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United Nations Educational Scientificand Cultural OrganizationCDS/ISISInformation StorageandRetrieval SystemDavide Storti - UNESCO CI/INF DivisionUNESCO - 2000CDS/ISIS - What it is?• CDS/ISIS is a generalized Information Storage andRetrieval System• It is intended to be used for structured non-numericaldatabases containing mainly texts• It is specialized in handling variable-lengthinformation• It may manage stand-alone as well as local networkdatabase systems2CDS/ISIS - What it is?• Unlike Dbase or MS-Access, CDS/ISIS is not arelational database system, although it provides somerelational facilities•CDS/ISIS deals with questions like: "which researchprojects deal with basic education in India?"• It may be expanded by advanced users (programmers)for adding new services and tools• A wide variety of solutions for Internet publishing ofdata are already available3CDS/ISIS - What is a database?• The term "database" denotes a collection of structuredinformation• A database contains data elements called "records"• Each record in the database has the same structure• Some units of information in a record may be absent,some others may occur more than once (a book mayhave more than one author or may not have an ISBN)• Data units in a record are called "fields"• Fields may contain independent data elements called4"subfields".CDS/ISIS - What is a database?Example of database structure5CDS/ISIS - Basic features• CDS/ISIS allows the user to ...