Descripción

• The information concept and its representation and accessibility to users in a simple but complete form is becoming a requisite for organizations that produce and manage knowledge bases. The following article shows a solution to this need that uses a post-relational data base. Relational data bases are the first and widely used tools to handle and store data but the technique of converting complex information in a normalized form can cause a lack of consistency. Transforming structured information into flat data and then reconstructing the whole information from simple tables can arise problems of fragility and complexity. On the other side, complex information is naturally represented in a structured form, able to express and declare the variety of links between data. This requirement is fully covered by post relational data base and object oriented data base, that rely upon post relational ones and were created to meet object oriented programming requirements. There's another requirement to fulfil: information must be usable and safe during all its lifetime with low costs and work charge. That's why standard open solutions, as eXtensible Markup Language to represent information, are the natural choice to put beside post-relational data base. Those are the bases upon which rely the Extraway Project by 3D Informatica. A twenty years experience in information technology software allowed 3D Informatica to create a native XML data base, born to fulfil information management requirements. Extraway is an information management system that, due to a post-relational approach, can give full integrity of information units - called records - during their lifetime. Those objects are automatically completed by meta data: timestamps, creator, owner, context etc. and locked by an integrity code. The choice of XML goes over the simple representation of information: Extraway uses this format to save information directly on file system in a very flexible and efficient way. A record of information is the indivisible union of data, meta-data and content files, whose changes are tracked, step by step, to keep the record's whole life available, in order to reconstruct it from initial version to current release. In such a scenario Extraway is the choice that gives the records a wider horizon, even over the software used to create and manage them now.

Autor

• Tirabassi, Roberto

Fecha

• 2007

Tipo

• Journal Article (On-line/Unpaginated)
• NonPeerReviewed

Idioma

• it

Identificador

• http://eprints.rclis.org/11923/