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

The amount of available data in the neuroscience community is growing rapid ly, and is approaching the point where researchers can no longer keep up. T his paper describes the development of the Modeler's Workspace, a digital l ibrary system we are building to improve the researcher's means of accessin g, managing and sharing neuroscience data. The Workspace consists of a dist ributed system of heterogeneous databases, and a Java front-end for data mi ning and visualization. A three-tier architecture with CORBA as the middlew are facilitates database federation. We discuss our design choices, and som e sociological issues, such as how to encourage data submission and ensure security and quality control. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights res erved.