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Contenido archivado el 2024-04-15

Design and Operational Evaluation of Office Information Servers

Objetivo

The objective of DOEOIS was to design, build and evaluate a small family of prototype Office Information Servers (OIS) capable of holding, in digital electronic form, representations of all office information, including what is currently committed to paper, and also the state of such activities as clerical procedures and industrial processes. The design and evaluation of the OIS were based on survey data directly derived from current office practice.
The objective of project was to design, build and evaluate a small family of prototype office information servers (OIS) capable of holding, in digital electronic form, representations of all office information, including what is currently committed to paper, and also the state of such activities as clerical procedures and industrial processes.

A common 2-layer representation was established for the information held in the servers and the functions needed to manipulate and manage it. At the lower layer, documents were held in an internalized version of the office document architecture (ODA)/office document interchange format (ODIF) standard, with the descriptive terms in the profile and logical structure made visible. A semantic data model, the fact model, was used to represent the higher level interrelationships between the objects held in the OIS. Key to the project was careful consideration of the issues involved in the handling of office procedures with a view to creating, activating and subsequently monitoring their progress. The functionality of the OIS was embodied in an external functional interface. This was intended to be an open applications interface designed to make applications portable to any OIS conforming to its specification. During the implementation phase 2 prototype servers supporting most of the specified functions, were completed. One was designed as a front end to a relational database management system (RDBMS). The other was on a mainframe resident semantic database management system that exploits hardware search by content of text files. A common real life application was implemented on top of each server to be used as a testbed for evaluating the functionalities provided.
A common two-layer representation was established for the information held in the servers and the functions needed to manipulate and manage it. At the lower layer, documents are held in an internalised version of the ODA/ODIF standard, with the descriptive terms in the profile and logical structure made visible. A semantic data model, the Fact Model, is used to represent the higher level interrelationships between the objects held in the OIS. Key to the project was careful consideration of the issues invo lved in the handling of office procedures with a view to creating, activating and subsequently monitoring their progress. The functionality of the OIS was embodied in an External Functional Interface. This is intended to be an open applications interface designed to make applications portable to any OIS conforming to its specification.
During the implementation phase two prototype servers supporting most of the specified functions, were completed. One was designed as a front-end to a relational database management system (RDBMS). The other is on a mainframe-resident semantic database management system that exploits hardware search by content of text files. A common real-life application was implemented on top of each server to be used as a testbed for evaluating the functionalities provided. The evaluation was based on a methodology developed within the project for this purpose and included both a technical inspection of the OIS functionality and a live evaluation of a sample application. The latter was compared in terms of measurable benefit indicators against a conventional paper equivalent and also an implementation based on a conventional RDBMS. The results of the evaluation were encouraging, with reductions of over 50% recorded in the time taken to execute highly structured and well-defined office tasks when compared to paper equival nts.
Exploitation
The analysis and design phases produced two advances: a four-level analysis methodology, which contributed the data needed to specify the functional requirements to be met by a generic server; and the OIS external functional interface, the actual definition of those functions The prototype servers resulted in technological improvements in the companies involved as well as intelligent front-ends to the databases employed. The project also contributed towards the establishment of the ODA tools currently available.

Tema(s)

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Convocatoria de propuestas

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Régimen de financiación

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Coordinador

International Computers Ltd (ICL)
Aportación de la UE
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Dirección
Lovelace Road
RG12 4SN Bracknell
Reino Unido

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Coste total
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Participantes (3)