Image Query Service Using Content Management Techniques

Trends in experimental sciences, such as astrophysics, have led to many critically needed, non-normalized, and massive meta-data catalogs that organize collections of recorded photographic and spectrographic observations of similar size. This paper reports on initial research that applies techniques of content management systems (CMS) to efficiently organize these observations and reference them for retrieval and processing by browsers, Web services for third party access, and plug-in provisions. A model is proposed that integrates a set of design patterns that are applied to a hierarchy of well-defined objects to construct an image retriever that is flexible and expandable.