Inside the Live Access Server

The Live Access Server (LAS) is a web based data server that provides unified access to data held at multiple institutions. This talk describes the techniques used to provide easy setup and configuration of LAS; access to remotely held data; multiple back-end visualization engines; collaborative 'sister' servers; scalability solutions; etc. By providing access to remotely held data along with multiple levels of attribution (links to information about the data set, the site serving the binary data, and the site hosting the LAS), LAS deals with both the technical and political aspects of collaborative data serving. In addition, the modular design of the code allows users of LAS great flexibility in modifying the appearance and behavior of their specific data server.

A high level overview of the capabilities of the Live Access Server and its future direction is presented in another talk.