During the past few years, many data-intensive applications have posed new challenges concerning storing, searching, querying, and retrieving large-scale complex data such as medical or satellite imagery, geographical and scientific data. With the increasing popularity of the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW), there is a fast growing need to make such data accessible through the Internet. The Distributed Cooperative Digital Archives (DCDA) research builds a framework to make such scientific and geospatial data discoverable and retrievable on the Internet. This approach is to enable a collection of independent data archives to share the load in order to enhance their collective system performance, while allowing individual archives to remain under the control of the corresponding data producers. This approach also integrates database support and web servers to provide scalable data retrieval and indexability. The issues being addressed in this research include: dynamic migration and replication of web documents, automated processing of web documents for database support, fast web-database connection, and web-enabled declustering of large-scale scientific and geospatial data. The results of this research include new algorithms, software tools and prototype system implementations for significant performance improvements in data delivery, searchability and scalability of servers. The educational goal of this research is to integrate the research tasks into a curriculum for teaching Web/Internet information processing to support meaningful research training for students. Additional effort is to develop and strengthen project-driven learning and web-enabled teaching environment to stimulate students' motivation for self-learning and problem solving skills.
