Data webs: an evaluation of an innovative information management tool that integrates databases with the world wide web Journal Articles

The World Wide Web (Web) has attracted significant amounts of interest from both researchers and business people. Until very recently, nearly all of the pages on the Web were made up of static text and data. Tools and methods have recently been developed which permit the development of applications for use over the Web. The key element to these systems is the ability to access and manipulate data from databases directly from Web interfaces. This paper addresses many of the issues involved with Web/database integration (resulting in systems called datawebs). In particular, traditional client/server models and systems are compared to the Web as an application development environment. It is shown that the datawebs are superior to traditional client/server systems in many regards. Nevertheless, the Web still has some problems associated with it such as concerns with data security and integrity, and this paper discusses a number of these shortcomings. This paper also introduces a sample dataweb which was developed to allow querying and maintenance of an on-line bibliography.