SARA, a Web Based Remote Sensing Digital Library

Earth Observation Systems (EOS) have provided over the years a tremendous amount of image data covering the surface of the Earth. These images are a potential source of information for lots of users working in various fields, like archaeology, geology, drawing of maps, ecology and others. In order to access this precious source of knowledge, the user needs to search for images of the zone of interest in a distributed database and to submit them to an elaborate processing to extract the required information. Various "static" approaches have been created to allow a user to search for an image with some specific requisites in the distributed database from a Java-enabled web browser. In the paper, a "dynamic" approach is presented. The system can autonomously make certain decisions in order to look for images and to process them according to high-level user's requests. The construction of this system has been possible exploiting the Globus toolkit.