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.