Design and performance evaluation of a web-based multi-tier federated system for a catalogue of life

  • Authors:

  • Xuebiao Xu;Andrew C. Jones;W. Alex Gray;Nick J. Fiddian;Richard J. White;Frank A. Bisby

  • Affiliations:

  • Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK;Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK;Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK;Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK;University of Southampton, Southampton,UK;The University of Reading, Reading, UK

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 4th international workshop on Web information and data management
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

In the SPICE (SPecies 2000 Interoperability Co-ordination Environment) project, we are designing and evaluating a web-based multi-tier federated system, intended as a scalable infrastructure for a globally distributed federated database of biological knowledge. It is designed to harness specialist expertise on classification of individual groups of organisms to form a 'catalogue of life' of high taxonomic quality, and to solve problems of heterogeneity, scale and component database unreliability while providing a reconfigurable, flexible, cost-effective Internet online gateway to the distributed catalogue. This paper outlines our design and design rationale, explaining how our multi-tier federated approach makes maintenance of a consistent classification easier. We present the conceptual architecture and several intelligent agents prototyped to improve system performance with respect to scalability, stability and adaptability, and discuss the evaluation of this system. Our most important finding is that a knowledge based search using suitable caching techniques will effectively reduce the response time unless the core system is excessively loaded.