Advanced networks and services and their role in managing web access to large audio archives

Markus Buchhorn and Stuart Hungerford (ANU Internet Futures)

GrangeNet in Australia, APAN in the Asia-Pacific, Internet2 in the USA and similar networks provide a foundation network infrastructure to researchers and educators around the world. This infrastructure supports a diverse range of user communities, with complex needs for high-end computing, large scale data management, and collaboration tools. The first part of this talk will provide an overview of these various networks, how to access them, and some archiving and analysis projects that might be of interest to this community.

Research projects that require access to multi-terabyte audio data repositories face many challenges in providing smooth access to the audio data contained in such repositories. In the second part of this talk we will examine one approach to providing consistent web access to audio data for both user-based web browsers and to automated web services and similar applications. This approach is based on the REST model for access to web services

(http://internet.conveyor.com/RESTwiki/moin.cgi/ShortSummaryOfRest).