A Web art gallery

1. THE GALLERY This paper describes the design and implementation of a virtual art gallery on the Web. The main objective of the virtual art gallery is to provide a navigational environment for the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD see http://www.ndltd.org and Fox et al., 1996), where users can browse and search electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) indexed by the pictures--images and figures--that the ETDs contain. The galleries in the system and the ETD collection are simultaneously organized using a college/department taxonomic hierarchy. The system architecture has the general characteristics of the client-server model. Users access the system by using a Web browser to follow a link to one of the named art galleries. This link has the form of a CGI query which is passed by the Web server to a CGI program that handles it as a data request by accessing the database server. The query results are used to generate a view of the art gallery (as a VRML or HTML file) and are sent back to the user’s browser. We employ several technologies for improving the system’s efficiency and flexibility. We define a Simple Template Language (STL) to specify the format of VRML or HTML templates. Documents are generated by merging pre-designed VRML or HTML files and the data coming from the Database. Therefore, the generated virtual galleries always contain the most recent database information. We also define a Data Service Protocol (DSP), which normalizes the request from the user to communicate it with the Data Server and ultimately the image database.