Supporting adaptable technical information systems in heterogeneous environments-using WWW and ORDBMS

Due to the ever rising competition in nearly all industrial sectors, there is a strong need for integrated information systems (ISs) that will store, retrieve, manipulate and exchange information efficiently to support all activities in an enterprise. Moreover, such an IS should not be a one-size-fit-all or a permanent solution, rather, the adaptability must be pursued so that the system can deal with all possible changes resulting from new technologies or new application demands. We present our first experience with developing such an integrated IS for a technical application domain. From the data processing point of view, the environment to be managed consists of distributed client/server systems embodied by heterogeneous hardware and software components; unconventional data types such as multimedia data and HTML statements are to be managed, and effective and robust database (DB) support should be provided. To meet the challenges posed by these advanced applications, new information techniques, such as World Wide Web (WWW or Web) and object-relational database management systems (ORDBMSs), are employed to facilitate a platform-independent DB access via a versatile user interface, as well as powerful DB services with high extensibility.