The project focuses on the management storage and analysis of large scientific databases. A cornerstone of the activity is the Karhunen-Loeve procedure which in a mathematically well defined sense provides an intrinsic and ideal representation for many forms of scientific data. The development of the snapshot method allows this procedure to be applied to hitherto unmanageably- large databases. This method is applied to the following cases: optical imaging of cortical activity using fluorescent dyes; a new simulation of the turbulent jet; and sea surface measurements obtained by telemetric means. Each of these cases leads to gigabyte or larger datasets. Lossy and lossless data encoding techniques are developed and melded in this project. New methods, including the wavelet and Wigner transform are developed for the visualization and presentation of large databases. Application of these methods to on-the-fly data acquisition and compression of large datasets is investigated. Results of this project will provide a set of tools which will make possible the collection, compaction, analysis, rapid exploration, visualization, progressive browsing and communication of exceedingly large databases of the sort encountered in engineering, pattern recognition and electrophysiology.
