Health Promotion Wales
- Optimizes the use of medical experts by using flexible algorithms to identify available resources
- Reduces data entry costs by using Web communities to allow experts to enter directly and update medical knowledge
OCC's challenge for the Health Promotion Wales (HPW) project was to extract information from knowledge with a non-regular and non-hierarchical structure which is a feature of our expertise. Our work for this project was implemented using Blackwell Scientific Publishers' Idealist product.
Porting a UNIX database
We 'ported' 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.
OCC chose the Idealist database management program for the HPW database 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 a database, which is not possible in MS Access. This enables users from a wide range of backgrounds to search for and retrieve the data.
- It offers flexibility through its variable-length fields feature (and hence variable-length records), which allows less rigid database structures to be implemented.
