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The Watermark Initiative is a project to develop a World Wide Web-based system
for the registration and description of papers and watermarks, a system that
is both a universal tool for research and a venue for publication of papers
and watermarks.
Its major products are
- the International Paper Registry
(IPR), a relational database for the registration and description of papers
and publication of digital images of watermarks and papers, and
- implementation of this database in a distributed database system.
The Watermark Initiative's IPR, implemented as a distributed database, constitutes
a universal portal for finding descriptions of papers and images of watermarks
in collections of paper-bearing objects located in participating archives all over the
world, and for publication of paper descriptions and watermark images. The IPR
serves the needs of scholars in all fields where research depends upon paper-bearing
objects (for example, art historians, musicologists, scholars who work with
documents, manuscripts, early printed books, contemporary artists who work with
hand-made or ornamental papers . . . ). It also serves the needs of curators,
librarians, restorers, dealers and auction houses, or others engaged in authenticating
objects on paper, detecting counterfeit objects and objects that have been fraudulently
altered or misidentified.
The Watermark Initiative's International Paper Registry meets the
needs of its wide-ranging clientele, as well as its mission of universal applicability,
through an easy-to-use Main
Menu which offers numerous points of entry for browsing and searching. These functions
of the distributed database work intuitively,
shielding the user from the intricacies of the underlying, highly sophisticated,
relational database.
The architecture of this
distributed database system consists of three major components:
- Archives, that is, local databases using the IPR containing descriptions
and images of papers and watermarks and served to the World Wide Web
- a search engine that enables searching of all the archives with
a single search
- a WWW interface that enables browsing and searching an archive.
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