Affiliations: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, California 94550, USA
Note: [*] Work performed under the auspices of the US Department of Energy by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under contract number W-7405-ENG-48.
Abstract: The concept of gateways and front-ends as a means to facilitate access to the growing multiplicity of computer-based resources is becoming increasingly popular. But the design philosophy and implementation of most of these interfaces constrain the user to a predefined, limited set of resources. For example, some front-ends facilitate searching certain data bases while others may handle more data bases, but only via certain vendors. The TIS Intelligent Gateway, developed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has eliminated such constraints on users by incorporating an extensible meta-machine approach to accommodate unlimited target resources and by providing a universal-user interface to simplify communication between the user and target resource. Target resources can be located externally to the gateway or installed on the gateway processor, resources can be access services (e.g. Pro-Search, Easynet, Sci-mate), data-base systems (full-text, bibliographic, numeric, or otherwise), or processing tools (statistical analysis, editing, word processing, trend analysis, etc.). The user has access to that combination of tools and data sources which satisfies his idiosyncratic information needs. As those needs change over time, or new users join the system, resources can be added dynamically without any interruption of ongoing operations. The development and implementation of this dynamic approach to resource provision are detailed in this paper.
Keywords: Intelligent gateway, front-end software, virtual information systems, user needs, virtual resources
