Providing public access to a scientific database while maintaining data integrity

The philosophy behind our geodetic database is that it is to be a place where geoscientists can freely submit their data and browse the data of others. This philosophy boils down to two major design goals that apply to any scientific database open to public access. First that submitting and browsing the database should be as simple as possible; otherwise users will abandon the database out of frustration. Second guarantee the integrity of the scientific information, otherwise users will not trust any of the information they find in the database. The implementation of these two often contradictory goals is presented in this paper.