EnTRy 3 : TRS WINISIS

INTRODUCTION

The ISIS software family is a set of textual database software’s based on the same data formats to which a very strong retrieval engine for searching information and an even more powerful formatting language for displaying of information. The data format allows for textual information of the ‘semi-structured’ type to be stored in a highly economical but still very organized way. By these capabilities, ISIS software can accommodate for the international information formats MARC, CCF and other ISO-2709 based formats. These formats are most widely used in libraries, documentation and information centers.

WinISIS uses the same database structure as CDS/ISIS for DOS. Databases created by DOS versions of the CDS/ISIS system do not require any changes to be processed by the Windows version of this system. Moreover, if display and print formats as well as FST tables do not use new features of the formatting language of WinISIS, a database created by the Windows version of the CDS/ISIS system can be processed by its DOS version.

WINISIS is widely used in developing countries due to its low cost and flexibility. It is a low-cost program, and is useful for all sizes of resource centre, and those that need to produce resource lists and other outputs. However, it takes some time to learn the more complex features, such as the formatting language

From what I learned in class to create database using WinISIS, we can said that there have several features of WinISIS such as

·         many databases can be opened simultaneously, in particular the same database can be opened several time, if the same database was opened in various windows each of them can display another record or the same record shown according to another display format

·         Easy access to databases used recently, we can be forced to select a database from the database list

·         Global record processing operations (add a field, delete a field and replace text in a field contents) are available from the system utilities menu.

When to use WinISIS exactly, WinISIS is best suited in situations where:

·         there is a need for non-standard, sophisticated solutions

·         information of very different types (with different ‘field structures’) is to be integrated into one database allowing for multi-type information retrieval

·         Financial constraints are real on the one hand, but manpower is available on the other hand.

After done an exercise and assignment given, it seems that using WInISIS database deals with textual information:

·         Database structures can be defined for an unlimited number of databases

·         The data are stored in records, with fields and subfields as structural units

·         ‘Data extraction’ or definitions of what exactly to register, can be defined for indexing, displaying and conversion of data

·         records with fields, parts of fields or processed fields can be formatted for display, printing or sending through the Internet also this formatting can define character-mode, Rich Text Formatted or HTML-formatted outputs

·         An unlimited number of formatting definitions can be defined and applied to the data.

WinISIS cannot easily deal with:

·         numerical values, so applications where intensive calculations (as in accounting and stock management) are needed are not good candidates

·         very dynamic data where high numbers of information units are to be replaced all the time by new values (as in financial systems)

·         data where the presentation lay-out elements (fonts, page characteristics…) need to reside with the data themselves or are set for individual words (as in textprocessors and electronic publishing software)

·         huge text documents (like books), unless these are split into smaller subunits (as ‘records’)

Using WinISis we can process data using several processes such as data entry, update data, search record, print record, browse record, delete record and others. All these are the main function to make the data useable.

For the first step, we are introduced about the functionality have around the menu bar. All functionality need to understand to make sure that in the end we are not produced the wrong data required

For the data entry we have learned about how to enter data and if the data need to repeat we can make it repeatable