This project implements a prototype digital library focussed on environmental information, with a concentration on the utilization, evaluation and preparation of environmental impact reports, statements and related documents. The prototype system is intended for eventual full-scale deployment in the State of California's CERES production systems. The research plan has three primary goals: provision of a coherent, content-based view of a diverse set of information objects distributed geographically; achievement of scalability to very large collections, clients and servers, and the development of new data acquisition technologies. The project strong reliance upon the success of extending alpeady developed conventional DBMS technologies to support of subelement access and content-based views. More radical approaches are planned for automated document segmentation and topic characterization in order to define and locate material in a "topic space" and image analysis for retrieval and browsing.
