ARCHITECTURE

The implementation of this project is based on network architecture principles with dedicated hosts. The project will take advantage of existing standards in the field of text, image and sound digitization and standards for communication protocols. It implies the use of a common interface for retrieval and navigation tools (e.g. hypertext). It will be available on existing telematics networks and will be developed in a perspective of innovation and quality.

The final user will be able to access this service from one’s own personal terminal and will navigate in the collection using friendly, multilingual and interactive software tools. For instance, he will be able to browse through a poem of Victor Hugo or to look at the poet’s drawings or link the 16th century discoveries to outer space shuttles reports.

Bibliotheca universalis is based on the following technological approach.

Network environment : a user having access to telecommunications facilities (ISDN, INTERNET, Freeways,...) will be able to search information in the whole network, irrespectively of the physical location of the information. The target system will be an international network of libraries and information providers, available on line.

Distributed system : the information elements are owned by several entities and as such stored and located on distributed information hosts, based on client/server model of computing.

Advanced retrieval functionalities : it requests a common interface for retrieval and definition of navigation tools that gives the end user the possibility to :

1. express questions in natural language in an interactive graphic and text format ;
2. follow links representing hierarchies, various semantical relations between documents ;
3. browse a set of selected documents and images to explore their content.

Common standards : implementation should be based on international standards related to communication and access protocols, interfacing techniques, data capture (e.g compression techniques) and formats, intelligent locators of information (e.g navigation tools and directories).

Bibliotheca universalis will take advantage of common standards for representing, indexing and communicating cultural information. Bibliographical standards (Unimarc, ISBD, ISSN...), document and image format standards for the encoding of text (HTML, SGML, ...), telecommunication protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP) will be taken into account as well as navigating tools (WAIS, W3, MOSAIC...).