VisualDB: Managing and Publishing Scientific Data on the Web

Scientific data have become an important part of human knowledge and are playing an important role in knowledge discovery and subsequent scientific research. Some systems and tools are developed to help data owners manage and publish their data online. However, a generic integration framework for relational databases and files is still absent. This paper presents VisualDB as a Web-based management and publishing tool for scientific data, which connects relational records and files distributed in multiple distributed repositories, serving them as a whole data source through VdbServer. After reviewing related work, the Linked Entities Model (LEM) is proposed as a general logical model for representing relational records and files. Then problems and corresponding solutions of managing and publishing scientific data are systematically discussed. After introducing the architecture of VisualDB, the paper is concluded with introduction of application and future work of VisualDB.