The challenge of extracting information from knowledge that does not have a regular, hierarchical structure is a feature of OCC's expertise.

OCC's work for the Health Promotion Wales (HPW) project was implemented using Blackwell Scientific Publishers' Idealist product.

The Health Promotion Wales project concerns the 'porting' of HPW's UNIX database system to Idealist, running under Microsoft Windows. The functionality of the system is unchanged, but the interface is adapted to reflect Microsoft Windows user interface guidelines.

Idealist database management program was chosen for OCC and Health Promotion Wales because:

• It is designed to manage textual information, and is particularly suited to information that cannot be organised into a strict and regular structure.
• It allows free-text searches of the entire contents of an Idealist database, something not possible in MS Access. This enables users from different socio-cultural backgrounds to retrieve the data they are seeking.
• It offers flexibility through its variable-length fields feature (and hence variable-length records), which allows less rigid database structures to be implemented.