Beyond HTML: Web-Based Information Systems

In this paper we briefly review current status of Web-Based Information Systems (WBIS) and present a number of different WBIS technologies and how they are being integrated during the ARHON project (Archiving, Annotation and Retrieval of Historical Documents). The project amounts to transforming a vast collection of OCR-resisting historical manuscripts belonging to the Vikelaia Municipal Library at Heraklion, Crete, to a fully functional Digital Library supporting the needs of casual users as well as scholar researchers [1]. The solution we opted for, was the creation of an image database and the adoption of standard Web browsers enhanced with Java applets for browsing, querying and updating the database. This way we managed to provide an Intranet based querying and retrieval mechanism through a Web server. The access mechanism was designed to work with standard browsers so that at a later stage Internet access to the digital library should be trivial to implement. Initial decisions and results were presented in [2].