Distributed Databases: The Case of Multiple Servers
Harry E. Payne · Open Astronomy · 1997
Tremendous volumes of astronomical data are available at sites scattered about the World Wide Web (WWW).We have become familiar with the client/server model for accessing this information.If we view these services as a single distributed resource with multiple servers, the task of information retrieval takes on some new problems, such as inter-operability, reliability and speed.I discuss three approaches to the problem of searching multiple servers, which differ to the extent in which the retrieval engine is centralized.