NASA has recently chosen it for managing data for its Earth Observing System Data and Information System. Oracle is expected to have a competing product in the very near future. The actual choice of this software will be the first task of the project. Whatever the choice, because the data will be added to the system incrementally, our plan is initially to purchase only a few licenses and add more later as they are needed, spreading the cost into the out years. The second important software component provides access to the database from the web.
Several products are currently available, and others are entering the market daily.
Actually, there are several tasks that must be addressed, and not all tools that are presently on the market handle all tasks. Because this is a rapidly developing market, we plan to postpone our selection as long as possible, concentrating first on getting data into the system. Consequently, this is seen as a budget item for the second year. However, Next's WebObjects might be preferred, because it fits nicely with existing software from Next currently used by the Hurricane Research Division and because it might provide better web access to existing codes for manipulating data. It should be noted that, in addition to the purchase of the software and licenses to develop web access to the data, a significant additional expense will be the license for allowing outside users to access the database via the web.