Resource Sharing System for Humanity Researches

The NIJL has developed variety kinds of databases, i.e., catalogue databases, image databases, movie databases, and full text databases. As these systems have been developed under different backgrounds, users have to learn different command for each database. Furthermore, although some databases have similar contents, users cannot access related information unless they understand NIJL database system well. This paper describes NIJL's new resource sharing system, called “NIJL Collaboration System,” to solve above problems. The “NIJL Collaboration System” is an ongoing project involving data conversion to XML and developing platform independent data manipulation system for a distributed environment. The essential of the project is to introduce XML as a common data description, Dublin Core meta-data as a common access points to databases, and Z39.50 as a common searching protocol. This system enables users to access various sorts of multimedia data in distributed databases on the WEB seamlessly by a single graphical user interface.