Another project that might be worth looking at in this connection is Pears,
from the Office of Research at OCLC. It's open-source database software, and
is described: "Pears databases have features that make them ideal for
storing hierarchically structured data, such as bibliographic records,
authority records and text documents." See
http://www.oclc.org/research/software/pears/index.shtm. It uses BER
internally: "Arbitrarily large records with arbitrarily complex hierarchical
structure containing both text and binary data are supported in BER records
(ISO Standard 8824)." It also supports unicode. I don't have the database
architecture expertise to compare it to dbXML, so I'll leave that to others.
The license may be an issue (OCLC rolled their own rather than using GPL,
and I haven't gone through it).
Peter
Peter Binkley
Interface Development Coordinator, TAL Online
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
phone: 492-5282, ext. 242
fax: (780) 492-9243
post: Cameron Library 4-30
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta
T6G 2J8
---------------------------------------------------------------------
In case of troubles, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
