A Data Model for a Mobile Image Query Service

Photographic observations of the night sky can best be presented using a data model that conveys the observations, analysis, objects contained with the observations, and results of analysis pertaining to those objects. Such a model is proposed in this paper and it is referred to as the internet Flexible Image Transport System (iFITS), along with a mapping function to transform instances of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 1 (DR1) to instances of iFITS, and a hybrid light-weight marshaling method to transfer DR1 data to the implementation of iFITS. iFITS is implemented as a mobile code agent that supports client-based image retrieval in web-based mobile computing environments. The implementation of iFITS was tested against the Image Query Service of SDSS Data Release 6 and the Revised Image Query Service recently proposed. The experiments results reported show a three-fold speedup for iFITS.