Federated or cached searches: Providing expected performance from multiple invasive species databases

Abstract

Invasive species are a universal global problem, but the information to identify them, manage them, and prevent invasions is stored around the globe in a variety of formats. The Global Invasive Species Information Network is a consortium of organizations working toward providing seamless access to these disparate databases via the Internet. A distributed network of databases can be created using the Internet and a standard web service protocol. There are two options to provide this integration. First, federated searches are being proposed to allow users to search “deep” web documents such as databases for invasive species. A second method is to create a cache of data from the databases for searching. We compare these two methods, and show that federated searches will not provide the performance and flexibility required from users and a central cache of the datum are required to improve performance.

Keywords

design / performance / invasive species / web services / databases / federated search / search engine

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Acknowledgements

Funding was partly provided by the US Geological Survey National Biologic Information Infrastructure (NBII) Invasive Species Node. Logistic support was provided by Colorado State University and the US Geological Survey. Additional support and advice was provided by Dr. Wei GAO and the Integrated Bioclimatic-Dynamic Modeling of Climate Change Impacts on Agricultural & Invasive Plant Distributions in the United States project funded by USDA CSREES-NRI-2008-35615-04666. We thank Michael Browne and Kyle Braak for comments on the manuscript. Any use of trade, product, or firm names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the US government.

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2014 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg