The Virtual Domain Application Data Center: serving interdisciplinary Earth scientists

The authors address the data access and analysis issues faced by interdisciplinary Earth scientists and graduate students as a prototypical domain community which will be accessing large data sets in Earth system science in the following decades. They present a working prototype developed at George Mason University to serve wide user needs termed Virtual Domain Application Data Center (VDADC). The VDADC prototype provides tools, data products and services tailored to users and can be extended to other domain communities. The VDADC operates in a distributed environment, the World Wide Web, and in close association with federated data centers. Moreover, the information technology implementation is driven by science scenarios and can apply to a variety of domain users, thus reducing network traffic the data centers by implementing intelligent data searching or "content-based browsing" prior to data ordering thus more effectively addressing user needs.