The Prospects of Publishing using Advanced Database Concepts

Publishing is a distributed process which is characterized by the cooperation of different experts. The approach of the Integrated Publication and Information Systems Institute (IPSI) to support electronic publishing is to build an integrated publication environment. The publication of electronic documents demands enhanced support from publishing tools and imposes new challenges on database technology. Taking a hypermedia reference publication as an example, requirements on database technology for the production of electronic publications are discussed. Those can be met by using an object-oriented database management system like VODAK. We present an efficient, flexible and application-independent database application for structured document handling (D-STREAT). Our focus is on dynamic Document Type Definition management.