Status report for T6: Multimedia databases

WebRDBMS:

Our current development is in two major areas:

1. Investigate major development and performance issues in
   1) interfacing traditional RDBMS technology with WWW environment, 
   2) building production-level information systems using RDBMS and
      Web technologies

   Our technical strategy is to use Oracle 7 RDBMS server to
build mail-based database, including USENET newsgroups, mailing lists
and personal mailboxes, and use the system as a major vehicle or testbed
to conduct/experiment major issues in Web and RDBMS integration.

Major issues examined and implemented during the past period include:

1) make 'session-less' WWW client-server interations to be
'seesion-oriented' by using RDBMS techniques. This is implemented
in 'query refining',client connection identificaton and archive
server statistics of the archive system (http://asknpac.npac.syr.edu).
2) support on-line searching and updating of database or
data repository using RDBMS's concurrent control facility. 
This is illustrated in every hour on-line updating of the archive.
3) initial experiment in creating a collaborative USENET newsgroups
   environment and service using WWW and RDBMS technology.
   This is illustrated in a new folder typoe called 'Chat-Board'
   and the capability of replying,posting and composing directly
   from the WWW-based archive search interface.

2. Web search systems using RDBMS and full-text indexing technology
    Our technical strategy is to use Oracle 7 RDBMS server as
   search engine and Oracle's Context server facility as
   full-text indexing engine to build backend web search engine,
   while developing our own 'web robot' and web search interfaces.

1) we are currently focusing on deveoping a high performance
prototyping 'web robot' for gathering documents from remote web sites.
2) a prototype search interface is finished, using Oracle's Text
Retrival software and Oracle7 RDBMS server as search and index engine.
This is demonstrated in the search system for NPAC's official web server
(http://kayak.npac.syr.edu:1963/search/npac-query.html).

Status report for A3: EMS

Nothing is done yet. Not clear how to proceed and my responsibility
in this task.