Electronic Publishing with Oracle Book

This document introduces some concepts associated with electronic publishing, and the Oracle Book V2.0 product.  The following topics are covered in this document:

Introduction

Information Access

Oracle Book V2.0

Introduction

Most people are familiar with data storage and retrieval applications.  But the increasing power and storage capacity of today's computers are also being applied to the distribution and storage of less structured information.  Examples include online training materials, contracts, maintenance manuals, and multimedia presentations including images, sound, and even video.

The distinction between structured and unstructured data is important.

Structured data is regular.  Every record in a sales-order table, for example, has the same layout.  Moreover, the relationship between records in the sales order table and records in the inventory table is fixed.

Unstructured data, however, is not regular.  A collection of maintenance manuals may share similar information, but the connections and cross-references among the manuals are anything but regular.  Access to such interconnected and unstructured information requires storage techniques and user interfaces that go far beyond the form and table models used for database applications.

Information Access

For most of us, the most familiar source of information is still the printed book.  Therefore, selecting the book as a familiar metaphor for presenting online information is a good choice.

Online Books

An online book should be at least as useful as a paper book.  It should have a table of contents and an index, because these are useful features with which we are familiar.  It should include pictures, as well as text, and it should be easy to scan through and search.

Ideally, we should be able to add personal bookmarks, and make annotations, or marginal notes, just as we would with a paper book.

It's easy to understand how an online document could be more useful than paper.  The familiar table of contents and index of the online document are much faster to use, because the reader can "point and click" to navigate to the desired entry, rather than flipping through pages.

Searching for information is even more powerful.  With online documents, the user can find all occurrences of a particular word or phrase anywhere in the document.

Finally, online documents can be richly interconnected and cross-referenced using hypertext links to provide non-linear paths through the information.  Hypertext links are words or phrases that relate to other information in the document.  They are typically displayed in a special typeface or style.  Users can select these links to immediately display the related information.  These links are similar to "see also" references, but are much more powerful because they are faster and more convenient to the user.

Other Representations

Despite its usefulness, the book is not the only metaphor used for online information.  Another very common representation is the card stack. Card stacks are conceptually similar to files of index or note cards.  Typical uses for stacks are simple, single-table databases, such as sales leads or client addresses.

Stacks can also be used for electronic publishing, however, by arranging the individual cards into a network, or web, of interconnected information nodes.  Such webs generally consist of many small items of information (perhaps only a few paragraphs each), richly interconnected by hypertext links.

One of the primary dangers of using webs for information organization is that users can become lost in the web; they may not know how they got to a particular piece of information, how to find it again, or how to get back to where they came from.  To solve these problems, some web systems structure information into fixed hierarchies.

The Best Representation

Clearly there is no single best representation for online information, and our knowledge of how to construct online documents continues to grow.  It is safe to say, however, that any online system that offers a combination 
of text searching, hypertext links, an index or map, and a history mechanism, can provide a fast and powerful alternative to paper documents.

Oracle Book V2.0

Oracle Book is intended to meet the needs of electronic information publishing.

Users can use Oracle Book to document their own applications, or to provide online versions of catalogs, manuals, training materials, and other types of information.

Oracle Book makes use of the book metaphor, as opposed to stacks or webs.  Most of the information that users will want to publish electronically is currently organized into books.

Designer Features

Creating online documents is in some ways very different from creating documents for distribution on paper.  Authors and editors of paper documents put substantial effort into formatting their documents to look good on paper.  The author and editor must make many assumptions about their audience's reading preferences in terms of which fonts and styles are used and where.

However, one of the key goals of electronic publishing is to empower the reader of the document.  This includes giving readers the ability to tailor the appearance of the document to their own individual needs.

The author of an online document, therefore, can spend less time on the format of the document, and more time on the organization of the information.  For example, authors should make sure there are plenty of navigational aids available to their readers, such as different heading levels, index entries, and hypertext links.  These elements ensure that the document is adequately accessible to the reader.

Oracle Book Designer provides filters which allows authors to filter their word processing documents directly into online format. These word processing filters allow authors to create both a printed paper document and an online document from the same source.  

In addition, Oracle Book Designer provides a tag language which allows authors to define information structures by "tagging" text elements in their source files.  The tag language also provides the ability to create complex tables.  

Viewer Features

For the user, Oracle Book provides the following navigational tools:

table of contents

index

hypertext links

search capability

history mechanism

Since information is often scattered through multiple documents, Oracle Book allows users to define libraries, or sets of online documents.  Searches can be done on an entire library or on selected documents.

With Oracle Book, the appearance of the document can be tailored by each individual reader.  Oracle Book allows users to choose fonts, font sizes and styles, and even colors.  Changes in the appearance of the document can either be applied to the screen version of the document, the printed version, or both.  

In addition, Oracle Book allows readers to insert personal bookmarks, private hypertext links, and annotations.  Annotations can be in the form of text, images or sound.

Each user's personal modifications are stored in private files and do not change the original document.  These private files can be distributed to other users.










