Conceptual Design and Development ofInformation

Due to the development of the internet and cable nets information services are going to be widely used. On the basis of projects for the development of information services like regional information services or shopping services we develop a method for the creation of information systems and services to be used through diierent nets. The approach is based on the codesign of data, dialogues and presentations. The main concepts are information units and information containers. These basic concepts for information services are presented in this paper. Information units are deened by generalized views with enabled functions for retrieving, summarizing and restructuring of information. Information containers are used for transfering information to users according to their current needs and the corresponding dialogue step. Size and presentation of information containers depend on the restrictions of the users environment. 1 Background ThèInternet' is currently one of the main buzzwords in journals and newspapers. However, to become a vital and fruitful source for information presentation, extraction , acquisition and maintenance fundamental design concepts are required but still missing. To bridge this gap we investigate information units and information containers and their integration with database-backed infrastructures. These are based on practical experience from projects for the development of a regional information and shopping service and meant to be the main concepts for the development of integrated information services. 1.1 Information Services Currently we can observe a common and still increasing interest in information services to be used with the internet. Unfortunately, there is no systematic or even commonly accepted approach in building these services. On the other hand it is the goal of conceptual modelling to provide adequate methods for this task. Then at least the following problems have to be met: { Conceptual understanding of information services; { Integration of diierent information systems; { Maintenance of information quality; { Evaluation of information quality; { User-adequate presentation of information collections; { Ressource-adequate transmission through networks. Due to the large variety and diversity of information services it is advisable to concentrate either on speciic aspects or characteristics. Our experience on information service development is based on two large industrial cooperations: In the project FuEline 7, 18] an online database service has been developed for collecting, managing, trading and intelligently retrieving data on industrial and university research facilities. The system realizes a client-server architecture using the retrieval-oriented database machine ODARS. The system is currently used as the …