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1. Introduction: J-ISIS as UNESCO's new addition to the ISIS-software family
In spite of the fact that in the last few years UNESCO's "General Information Programme", once closely linked to CDS/ISIS as its most successful software tool in terms of downloads and high usage esp. in developing environments and Latin America, has dropped its direct input into the software development, still a major effort by Mr J.-C. Dauphin (who retired from UNESCO in 2010) was supported to develop a quite new, in some ways revolutionary version of the software to replace the popular WinISIS: J-ISIS ([4] Dauphin, 2008, [5] 2010). J-ISIS (J for Java) claims to replicate the full functionality of WinISIS but at the same time taking away its technological limitations, such as:
Windows only, by using the Java-platform which is known for its radical platform independency.
Database and record-size, by substituting the proper ISIS storage technology of the MST/XRF-files completed by a B-Tree indexing engine with the technology of:
- the embedded no-SQL database "Berkeley DB" (at this moment owned by Oracle but maintained as FOSS) with limitations only defined by hardware; and
- Lucene-based full-text indexing and searching.
ASCII/ANSI coding, now replaced by the UNICODE capability of Java.
However, in order to maintain the "core" of the ISIS-technology, the following concepts are still fully present in J-ISIS:
- Schema-less records, i.e. the field-structure remains individually assigned to each record, therefore representing the "documentary" approach of a database: each record can be a document with its own structure (as explained, e.g. by [15] Ramalho, 2011).
- Variable length fields, subfields and occurrences of fields: as a consequence of the previously mentioned feature, records store mostly textual values of any length in fields and subfields and can have 0, 1 or more occurrences, reflecting the original ISO-2709 standard on which, e.g. MARC as a bibliographical format is based. In J-ISIS the ISO-2709 standard is maintained for compatibility purposes (e.g. to allow easy migration from the many existing ISIS-databases) but supplemented by XML-based structures, since the "key-value" approach of Berkeley DB as a "no-SQL" database (see [12] Lai, 2009) leaves the structure of the "value" part to the application itself.
- A powerful "parser" to mold, format and extract values from the database, i.e. the...