MOBIE - A WWW Interface for Object-Based Databases

Overview
As part of the TSIMMIS project at Stanford, we have built a system called MOBIE for formatting and displaying semi-structured information as a "web" of hypertext documents using HTML and HTTP. The contents of these "documents" can then be explored using the built-in functionality of a web browser much in the same way one would explore the contents of a book. As part of MOBIE, users can customize the formatting of their results by choosing different layouts, or controlling how much of the object structure is visible in the browser, for example.

In its current implementation, MOBIE is used with information that has been translated into OEM (Object Exchange Model) which is used as the common data model in TSIMMIS. For our prototype demo, we are using a variety of sources(e.g., a relational DBMS, a collection of flat files, an online library, etc.) that are queried through one of the TSIMMIS query languages. More on information tarnaslation and querying can be obtained from the TSIMMIS home page.

Naming
As an acronym, MOBIE stands for "MOsaic-Based Information Explorer." When we started developping MOBIE, Mosaic was the only web browser available and we liked it so much that we made Mosaic part of the name. However, it is misleading in the sense that MOBIE is really based on HTTP and HTML and can be used with any forms-capable web browser.


Last modified on Thursday, October 31, 1996
The TSIMMIS Group at Stanford (tsimmis@db.stanford.edu)