Divergent Data Converge in Data
Warehouse with Web Interface
November 8, 1996
By Jeffery Kahn, JBKahn@LBL.gov
Taking advantage of this electronic commons, the Laboratory has launched a
project to bring a disparate plethora of administrative and institutional data
to the desktops of employees.
IRIS -- the Integrated Reporting and Information System -- started out as a
demonstration project. The Information Systems and Services group, headed by
Carl Eben, set out to show that it is not just theoretically possible but
actually feasible to make administrative data available on the Web. Sanctioned
by Deputy Director Klaus Berkner's Management and Information Systems group,
the project was launched in December 1995 by a team including Rose Bolton, Mark
Dedlow, and Esther Schroeder. By July, what had been conceived as an
experiment and prototype was so successful that it was brought online.
Using the IRIS web site, employees now can access and find information
contained in the Ledger, Property, Purchasing, Procard, Training, Account
Authorization, and Accounts Payable databases. In the future, IRIS will bring
additional information to the Web.
Dedlow described IRIS as a project conceived for the "grassroots user."
"This project makes it easier for people to do their job," he said. "IRIS
allows the average person, who is not a computer expert, to tap into databases
that had been difficult to access. And it helps that same person find
information within these databases that had been difficult to hunt down."
For the user, the beauty of IRIS is its simplicity. For the IRIS team, this
simplicity is a mark of their success.
Here as elsewhere, institutional data resides in a digital Tower of Babel.
The ziggurat is built using different computer languages, different database
systems, and different hardware. IBM mainframes and Sun servers, SQL and
COBOL-based programs, FOCUS and Oracle databases coexist at Berkeley Lab, but
cannot communicate with one another.
For the IRIS team, the challenge was to take this chaotic mix of information
and unite it within a single data infrastructure. The pioneers around the
world who now are attempting such feats call this infrastructure a "data
warehouse."
Says Dedlow, "The data warehouse coalesces and consolidates all these
disparate data sources into a single, uniform environment. Many of these data
sources are legacy systems, as old as 20 years, and lack uniform relationships.
One may reference an individual by an employee ID number and another reference
the same person by name only. The challenge is to extract or add the common
essential elements from all sources."
Creating a data warehouse is the invisible first step in delivering this
information to employees. It is the second step, the creation of IRIS, that
brings this information to the user. IRIS extracts information from the data
warehouse and makes it available via the Web. It responds to requests for
information by instantly creating, on the spot, hypertext linked Web files.
Dedlow says that IRIS was as challenging a project as the underlying data
warehouse. That's because using the Web to allow users to tap into
sophisticated relational databases means charting unexplored territory.
Systems analysts who work outside the Web have a rich set of tools for
extracting information and displaying it to users. Claris Corp.'s Filemaker is
a good example. Filemaker database developers use a point and click graphical
interface to build their applications. But in the world of the Web, the rapid
development tools either don't exist or are very primitive.
"We had to invent how to do this," said Dedlow. "A year from now, I imagine
that Web developers will be users of Web tools. Today, we're inventing our own.
That's what IRIS required."
IRIS and the data warehouse are in their infancy. In the months ahead,
additional sets of data will come online.
For instance, right now to access purchasing information, you need a purchase
order number. Soon, you can check purchasing information out by a search using
a vendor or buyer name. Other data will be added to the system such as stores
order information, travel information, and accounts payable information that is
updated daily.
The Information Systems and Services group believes this project represents a
great leap for institutional data and those who must have access to it. It's a
leap that takes data, translates it into information, and delivers it to the
customers' desktop.
Access to IRIS is for Berkeley Lab employees only and is controlled by requiring that users log in with their unix account login and password. IRIS can be found on the Web at http://www-iss.lbl.gov/ and you can contact Mark Dedlow at MTDedlow@lbl.gov for further information.
The World Wide Web is essentially an electronic commons.
Whether you have a Mac, PC, or workstation, whether you are a computer
scientist or computer illiterate, the Web can provide information that is
easily accessible to all.
