A taxonomically distributed data retrieval model Original Research Article

As many arising directory services are being implemented and a variety of collections of data are being made available, it becomes increasingly important for users the need of guidance through such a network of heterogeneous data. At CERN, different Physics Collaborations are setting up systems to provide data related to themselves (people, experiments, applications configurations, etc.). With this variety of services, when a generic CERN user wants to find a very determined piece of data (for instance “event number 24971 temperature conditions”), which service should he ask to? We present here a model aimed at solving this Data Retrieval problem. This is done by proposing a protocol for computers to exchange information about the data they offer and setting up the basic mechanisms to build up, maintain and query a distributed taxonomy of data. This taxonomy will be used to find a set of locations where a given userʹs query is likely to retrieve significant information.