A collaborative image database "out of the box"

This paper presents the design and implementation of a distributed (image) database on a TCP/IP network of heterogeneous machines. It is based on the tagged container idea: a dataset is treated as a black box and ragged with a description, which is stored in a freely searchable database. Using readily available public domain utilities with a minimum of "glue logic", this is a vendor-neutral, low-cost system. Furthermore, it supports the idea of collaboration by allowing multiple servers running under the policy of different departments.