We are developing widearea data warehousing software infrastructure for geographically distributed archives of large scienti c data sets, such a s satellite image data, that are stored hierarchically on  ...  disk arrays and tape silos and are accessed by a v ariety of scienti c and decision support applications.  ...  For pure Java applications, remote processing services are more easily implemented using Java RMI rather than CORBA. RMI is particularly useful for applications with Java applet client i n terfaces.  ...