Experiments on information retrieval mechanisms for distributed biodiversity databases environment

This paper mainly brings out the details related to a prototype biodiversity information retrieval system that has been setup using the distributed Grid-Cloud resources of GARUDA Grid project, India. The overall experiment has been done with the help of open source biodiversity databases. The structure of these relational database tables are not standardized and are hosted on a variety of Database Management Systems (DBMS) at different Virtual Machines (VMs) which in general been assumed as geographically distributed. The front end of the end user system is an HTML interface which captures and redirects the user query to the application engine which has been built using python and made functional in master grid node. According to the received input, the python program interprets the data and generates a query in the Structured Query Language (SQL). This generated query is sent to the distributed remote database servers which channelizes to the local DBMS of the cloud's virtual machine and executes the SQL query. The end results are retrieved back by the master grid application engine and been displayed in a new HTML page.