A good example of how a rich variety of data can be delivered via the web can be seen at
http://www.ned.dem.csiro.au/AGCRC/projects/3018CO/talks/GSA.htmla page maintained by the Australian Geodynamics Cooperative Research Center. Users can browse the data base and build queries via HTML forms which are then filled by the server. Similar schemes have been developed by the USGS and IRIS, for example
http://www.iris.washington.edu/We would certainly take advantage of this expertise.
We plan to use freely available database tools to make it easy to give away the database code as well. That way people could also locally augment the dataset and it might encourage people to keep local data in a compatible format. Further, anyone who wants to mirror the site will be encouraged to do so.