Coastal zone management

Abstract

The need for accurate data retrieval and use has become a very important issue in the field of ocean sciences, engineering and management. The amount of data collected and processed daily is vast and is expected to increase considerably in the following years. Above this, the lack of a globally accepted protocol for storing this data has created a lot of confusion and delays in using the data. The existing tools used to simulate the ocean environment, for reasons of prediction or research, are considered to be highly computationally intensive. Most of them also consist of large monolithic computer programs that are custom made to operate in a specific environment. In order to simulate accurately the ocean environment, either for forecasting or research, a lot of these applications should be able to work together. This could happen either by developing new software that will do so, extending the ones that exist to do so or find a way to link the existing software in a distributed environment as if they were together. In the case of extending or building new software that will handle all the tasks, we would find ourselves to be limited by the computational power of the existing computers. The need for fast computation and database integration leads to a distributed environment that includes a large number of computational resources, which are able to communicate with each other.This thesis describes the framework for distributing and linking applications over the World Wide Web (www). This thesis is part of a larger project code named Poseidon, which also involves the implementation of a Metadata Standard for data storage and retrieval.A tool also named HTMLParser is presented that can be used to automate the procedure of data mining from the www. The HTMLParser automates the procedure of database querying. It is used to extract specific information from the response of a database query and make it available to the user as an object for the Poseidon environment. The HTMLParser can become a very useful tool especially due to the increased rate of database porting on the Internet.