Interoperability Through Organization: Digital Libraries for Distributed Geospatial Information

The rapid development of communication and computing technology is changing the way scientific information is created, disseminated, managed, and used. Distributed computing, in particular, is increasingly being used as the foundation for scientific information management, collaboration, and publishing. This new foundation comes at a time when scientific budgets can rarely afford the creation of the large, vertically integrated scientific data centers which would otherwise be necessary to manage the explosion of information being produced today. Distributed computing is, therefore, being used to create a new scientific information infrastructure, and digital libraries are beginning to play a central role in emerging information systems.