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Paper: WWW as a Support for the Long Term LBT Archive
Volume: 77, Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems IV
Page: 40
Authors: Fini, L.
Abstract: Any large and complex project has the need to build and maintain an archive of all of its related information throughout its life. The archive content is typically multimedia in nature, consisting of drawings, pictures, papers and documents with different formats, spreadsheet data files, plots, and so on. When a project is the common effort of a number of institutions, as in the case of the Large Binocular Telescope Project, where several institutions in different countries are cooperating, the most natural structure of the archive is a distributed one, where each party has responsibility over a part of the database, but shares the data with the others. A completely distributed system, i.e., a system where a given data item is stored in a single site, would be impractical for both security and access efficiency reasons. A mixed approach, where stable data items are duplicated at all the participating sites, while the work-in-progress ones are stored only where they are generated, seems to be a safer one. WWW services can then provide a consistent access to the whole archive for all the involved parties.
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