INTEGRATED ACCESS TO INFORMATION SYSTEMS

The French Scientific and Technical Center for Building (CSTB) is involved in a very large number of programs, covering a wide range of scopes in the area of building, including technical, legal, social, and economic topics. The actions carried out encompass scientific research or technical missions, engineering, writing regulations, or state-of-the-art documents, such as unified codes of practice or assessment of the social impact of new technologies, and the need to facilitate access to this huge amount of data has become a considerable challenge. Information in such a case is a very generic term covering a vague understanding in that it can include basic data representing a primary corpus or, at the other end of the scale, sophisticated services offered by experts able to solve complex problems. Customers for such information have very different needs but agree on the necessity to facilitate access to the relevant data and to various high-value services accounted for by computer systems. As the semantic level of the services differs considerably, the need became apparent to merge different tools within an integrated software environment to satisfy the previous objective. The main components to be assembled are retrieval systems to locate the relevant data, object-oriented databases to offer a reusable storage model, hypertext and hyperobject systems to browse the content of hypermedia entities, and multifunctional expert systems to provide sophisticated computer systems with an adaptable entry and behavior.