Geographic information systems and digital libraries: Issues of size and scalability

摘要

The term "scalability" has specific connotations in Geographic InformationSystems (GIS) that conventionally relate to monitoring and predictinggrowth of geographic phenomena. A family of computationalmodels has been developed to predict changes in structure associatedwith changes in size. These models have been applied in physical science,social science, and cartographic science to study growth and mayassist in monitoring the growth of digital libraries as well. As the sizeof the digital library increases, challenges for data organization andcollection maintenance tasks will also increase. However, the rate ofincrease may not be in linear proportion to library size. At some criticalscales, existing procedures will fail and new procedures must beimplemented to accommodate further growth. Allometric principlesmay be applied to estimate these critical scales. Three aspects (datavolume, indexing, and metadata recordation) will be discussed in thecontext of implementing and maintaining a digital library containingspatial data archives distributed across local or global electronic networks.