Oracle

A agreement for a working relationship between the Oracle Corporation and the Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) Project was implemented by which the following interactions were planned:

1. participation by Oracle personnel in most of the major activities of the Alexandria Project, including interactions with ADL's other partners and the five other DL Initiative projects.
2. Input from Oracle, as a major partner in ADL, concerning the future development directions of ADL in particular, and DLs in general.
3. The presence of a high-level person from Oracle on the Advisory Board of ADL.
4. The provision to ADL by Oracle of applicable software modules for evaluation and application in the development of ADL, as well as strong technical support for the use of the software.
5. The physical presence at UCSB of a full-time engineer from Oracle, who will work closely with the researchers and developers of the ADL project in using Oracle products and expertise in constructing an operational DL for spatially-referenced information.
6. Hardware support that is available to ADL from Oracle, particularly in support of the storage and compute intensive activities that relate to the presence of an Oracle engineer at UCSB. It would also be useful for ADL to have Oracle's support in acquiring additional hardware resources that are required for the development of a DL.
7. Visits by personnel from ADL to Oracle and by Oracle personnel to UCSB to exchange technical information exchange.
8. Support by Oracle for ADL research activities, including support for graduate students and other researchers.

The specific focus of the joint activities include:

1. application and evaluation of Oracle's
   1. relational database software to relation to support for constructing, searching, and updating the metadatabase;
   2. ``object oriented'' database software to support the storage and accessing of complex objects in the metadatabase;
   3. Textserver products for full text search of large, structured metadatabases;
   4. Spatial Database Option to spatial search of the metadatadatabase;
   5. CASE tools in the construction of the metadatabases;
   6. knowledge about the parallel support for efficient database services.
2. development of object-oriented models for ADL's metadata.
3. development of spatial indexing of georeferenced information.
4. development of tools for the automated ingest of metadata, including metadata from other DLs
5. the development and implementation of standards and protocols relating to metadata for spatially-indexed items and for its exchange.
6. the development of WWW interfaces to the Alexandria catalog and the for efficient database support in WWW environments

To date, the Implementation Team worked with Oracle to set up a reference implementation of the Oracle DBMS and Spatial Data Option (SDO), in order to evaluate Oracle/SDO as a potential host for the ADL catalog. Oracle's primary contribution to this effort has been the extended visits to Santa Barbara of Mr. Thor Heinrichs-Wolpert. As a result of his interactions with ADL, we now have the following Oracle environment in place:

1. Oracle 7.3.2.3
2. SDO 7.3.2.2
3. Enterprise Manager repository
4. Web Request Broker
5. Enterprise Manager client (on Windows NT)

Since SDO is not yet supported on Digital UNIX (our platform-of-choice for the ADL catalog), we have set up a second Oracle installation, with SDO, on a Solaris host for experimentation. The Digital UNIX installation supports our complete catalog and gazetteer and is currently being tuned for the host system configuration, which involves 2 processors, 2 GB RAM, 24GB (expandable to 312GB) of RAID-4 disk.