The Technology

Built with flexibility and extensibility in mind, the openinteract environment is capable of accessing a wide variety of industry standard data sources (SQL, XML, Corba, etc.). And the foundation of the foundation of the system has been built as an open source solution, leveraging the strenght of the new paradigm in software development.

The openinteract environment consists of 3 layers. The foundation of the system is the Application Server. This regulates all activity, administration and security with in the system. The environment is supported by the Dina-Link Module, which organizes, indexes and inter-relates all information and activity. And of course there are the Productivity Tools, which use the Application Server and the Dina-Link Module to bring added value to members and growth to the community.

The Application Server is the foundation of the openinteract environment. The Application Server is the central control module of the online environment. It regulates security, data access, activity logs, error handling and interface design. It has been built with extensibility in mind so that new features can be easily added.

Open
Source
Application Server

Security is based on group-rights and is implemented for both tools and data. It can be set to allow certain tools and information to be available without user login, then provide varying levels of accessibility within a secure area. Each group is granted access to specific tools and data within the environment. Users then inherit rights from the groups that they are members of.

Data
&
Functionality
Security

Key to OpenInteract's data flexibility is the data abstraction layer. This layer (called SPOPS, for Simple Perl Object Persistence with Security) allows you to use any supported data store to fetch, create, update and remove objects. Current data stores include DBI (which supports most SQL databases), GDBM and configuration files. However, SPOPS can be easily extended to support CORBA objects, XML, LDAP directories or even simple text files.

Quickly
Connect to
SQL, XML, CORBA
and more.

The core of the environment's knowledge functionality is the Language Index. The Language Index is a list of terms (one or more words), a definition and an inter-relation between that term and associated terms. This inter-relations are described by a "link". Links are simply a notation of association, accompanied by the type of association (i.e. synonym, antonym, translation, sub-component, etc.)

Every tool in the environment produces knowledge elements (i.e. news stories, forums discussions, case studies, research, contacts, etc.). The Knowledge Index stores the inter-relations between these knowledge elements. Every knowledge element can be linked to one or more terms in the Language Index. These links are represented by a specific Type and Strength. In this way all knowledge elements related to a term can be quickly accessible, creating a valuable domain of information within the environment.

The Intelligent Search Index allows users to quickly search across the entire portal using keyword searches. This tool is also integrated into the Knowledge Index so that users can define data from a specific domain that should be keyword searched, increasing the users ability to get to the information they need.