Distributed information search and retrieval for astronomical resource discovery and data mining

Information search and retrieval has become-by nature a distributed task. We look at tools and techniques which are of importance in this area. Current technological evolution can be summarized as the growing stability and cohesiveness of distributed architectures of searchable objects. The objects themselves are more often than not multimedia, including published articles or grey literature reports, yellow page services, image data, catalogs, presentation and online display materials, and "operations" information such as scheduling and publicly accessible proposal information. The evolution towards distributed architectures, protocols and formats, and the direction of our own work, are focussed on in this paper.