Development of a Spatial Decision Support System
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while other datasets have to be leased from their owners and are available to the LOIS
community.
Within LOIS, data centres act to coordinate and assist with requests for data to
external bodies and the flow of data between research scientists. Emphasis during the first
stage of the DSS development has been on the integration of data and models. Currently the
user has access to 300 Mb of data spread across the network, and this total is likely to
increase to several gigabytes as data sets are extended to cover the entire coastline of interest.
There is also the potential for using the system to distribute and access data across the wide
area network (WAN). Interrogating external databases (such as Oracle) across the LAN