Multimedia information interchange: Web forms meet data servers

The increasing use of Internet technology and of Web servers and services has pushed several organisations to automate the access to their services and their data collection processes by using HTML form-guided dialogs. A large part of the information collected by these HTML forms already exists in the information system of the Web client, but today's form filling procedures suppose to fill forms "by hand". We propose a generic middleware program located on the client side and dedicated to automatically fill the data fields of the HTML forms by picking up the required data from the local information system. A key feature of our middleware is that it runs without any prerequisite on the server side. We initially developed our approach for the medical assistance domain to support decision making for remote patients and to improve the continuity of care. This application domain however is not restrictive and our approach may be easily used in other domains.