This document contains abstracts of papers on database design and management which were presented at the 1986 mid-year meeting of the American Society for Information Science (ASIS). Topics considered include: knowledge representation in a bilingual art history database; proprietary database design; relational database design; in-house databases;…

This introduction to the characteristics of software for CD-ROM describes programs used to format and create data stored on the disk, as well as retrieval programs. Criteria that need to be considered when evaluating CD-ROM software are discussed, including retrieval strategies (browsing vs. keyword searching), interfaces, index and file…

A project at Brown University has developed a set of application and system software that provides access to a database of Classical Greek literature which is stored on a CD-ROM. Information on the origins of the project is provided and the technical development of the system is described in detail, including the creation of Classical Greek fonts,…

Describes an approximate document ranking process that uses a compact array of in-memory, low-precision approximations for document length. Combined with another rule for reducing the memory required by partial similarity accumulators, the approximation heuristic allows the ranking of large document collections using less than one byte of memory…

This article reports results of a case study of text-based online and CD-ROM databases that identified design characteristics that are important to high school students' use for higher-level learning as well as for information access and retrieval. Implications for the design of databases are suggested. (Contains 62 references.) (LRW)