1996 Electronics Industry Environmental Roadmap - Civil and ...

Information and Knowledge Systems
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policy matters. Furthermore, communications tools available to support web sites
provide a mechanism for supporting professional networking and discussions. “Chat
rooms,” bulletin boards, and discussion groups are all accepted Web functions, and the
ability to establish multiple, specific networking opportunities, ranging from particular
processes to broad consideration of emerging technologies, can be an especially important
part of the site.
Furthermore, the development of middleware tools—directory services, security, financial services,
authoring tools—make the Internet an even more valuable resource. Commerce is already
being conducted across the Internet in a limited fashion, and new technologies promise to resolve
issues of security and transactions management in the very near term.
Accomplishing a comprehensive Web effort would require a dedicated staff focused on the
development, management, maintenance, and marketing of the site. Such a staff could be
supported through existing industry associations, consortia, government programs or other means
by which companies could share the cost of the resources required to maintain the program.
By and large, however, even highly interactive Web sites remain somewhat limited in their functionality.
If, for example, partners working together on a process wish to undertake real-time
transaction processing, utilizing some common data set, Web sites generally do not support this
kind of activity. However, tools now becoming available on the market allows corporations to
open gateways from Web sites to internal corporate databases. Utilizing these tools, along with
increasingly reliable security and authentication tools, corporations could establish compartmentalized
levels of access to corporate data. This would enable certain data to be made available industry-wide,
other data to be restricted to strategic partners, and other data to be restricted for
internal use for specified individuals.
It is, of course, also possible to establish these kinds of network systems on a private, proprietary
basis. Strategic alliances, or virtual partnerships, pursuing particular products, establishing
supply relationships, or working in the context of an industry consortium, can create a private
network through direct dial-up or dedicated linkages. Once established, a variety of open tools
exist on the marketplace to facilitate cross platform heterogeneous data access.
However, the objective of this discussion is to focus on the establishment of industry-wide information
resources, and therefore, a preferred route would be a linkage with an open World Wide
Web site.
One possible approach would be the creation of a multi-enterprise data warehouse through which
corporations can share data about environmental processes and easily maintain, update, and retrieve
data that might be useful to them, regardless of the platform on which any individual
corporation maintains its data. A data warehouse revolves around a relational database
management system (RDBMS) and contains data-management and data-access tools.
Companies use data warehouses to store, integrate, and maintain business information that has
been extracted from an operational database.
These kinds of data warehouses are supported by an increasing number of commercial tools that
encourage or support cross-platform compatibility, either through the establishment of data mi-