The Modeler's Workspace: a distributed digital library for neuroscience

The amount of available data in the neuroscience community is growing rapidly, and is approaching the point where researchers can no longer keep up. This paper describes the development of the Modeler's Workspace, a digital library system we are building to improve the researcher's means of accessing, managing and sharing neuroscience data. The Workspace consists of a distributed system of heterogeneous databases, and a Java front-end for data mining and visualization. A three-tier architecture with CORBA as the middleware facilitates database federation. We discuss our design choices, and some sociological issues, such as how to encourage data submission and ensure security and quality control. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.