WWW/ISIS Technical Reference Manual v. 5.1.0 / 00-12-01

1.1.ISIS on the Web

In the period 1989 - 1993 the dynamic development of the UNESCO’s information retrieval package Micro-CDS/ISIS was very promising. The number of its users increased in this period drastically. Some of the features of the package made it very useful for quite sophisticated applications. The main assets that were decisive for ISIS applications were:

text oriented data structures;
very powerful search engine based on inverted file technology;
indexing techniques;
programming language ISIS-PASCAL;
print formatting language;
easiness in defining a working database.

The package was successfully used in implementing very specialized systems in various area. Noteworthy, due to some advanced facilities designed and developed by the Institute for Computer and Information Engineering the Micro‑CDS/ISIS database applications provided by the Institute went far beyond what was offered by the standard Micro-CDS/ISIS software (as delivered by UNESCO), in particular, various look-up tables which contain key-words or descriptors supporting the data entry and/or query formulations have been implemented for the DOS platform. The authors of this document were involved in implementing number of various applications, using these tools, e.g. thesaurus maintenance software (MTM3 and MTM4), library management systems (LIS), terminology system (TDR) referral systems (TWG, IRMS), and many others (for details see http://www.icie.com.pl.).

Unexpectedly a new chance for ISIS applications came quite recently with the Internet offer. Suddenly it turned out that the nice and user friendly interface does not have to be provided by ISIS, as it can be done with HTML forms, whereas the other ISIS features suit perfectly to the features that should be satisfied by the database server in web. Let us discuss them briefly.