Bell Communications Research,
445 South St., Morristown, NJ 07960
Computer Science Department,
Rutgers University,
New Brunswick, NJ 08903
shklar@cs.rutgers.edu
A side-effect of the universal acceptance of the World-Wide Web
is an urgent need to provide Web access to the vast legacy
of existing heterogeneous information.
We believe that the most promising approach is building logical data
models and using these models to
support sophisticated presentation of the original information.
The objective of our InfoHarness
system [shk94, ssk95]
is to provide rapid access to large amounts of
heterogeneous information without any relocation, restructuring,
or reformatting of data.
Like MORE
and
HyperG
, the
InfoHarness
system utilizes object encapsulations for search and retrieval of
heterogeneous information.
An InfoHarness
object is defined
recursively as one of the following:
InfoHarness
object
encapsulating a logical unit of the original information.
InfoHarness
utilizes stable abstract
class encapsulation and presentation hierarchies, which need not be
modified to add terminal classes that accommodate new types of
information and new indexing technologies. It
provides tools for the automatic generation of metadata based on user
inputs and the analysis of existing information.
InfoHarness
is now part of Bellcore's
new ADAPT/X
product line. Our prototype
extension to InfoHarness
supports
complex structures of content-descriptive attributes. It utilizes
an extension to ODMG's Object Query Language (OQL) for integrating
queries against independent full-text indices into the traditional OQL
queries.
Closely related to this effort is our work on defining an Information
Repository Definition Language (IRDL
)
[shk95] - a high-level language for describing
information resources and the desired logical structure of information
repositories. The language provides high flexibility in imposing
abstractions on heterogeneous information.
Presently, the usefulness of IRDL
is limited because the interpreter generates metadata entities that may
be loaded into an InfoHarness
server
and instantiated as InfoHarness
objects.
This could change with the native Web support for objects, making the
IRDL
work much more interesting.
References