Information Management System: The-Off-The-Shelf System---A Packaged Information Management System

The Off-The-Shelf System (OTSS) is a packaged information management system for hierarchical data bases. Earlier work done by Sinowitz 1 was aimed at providing information retrieval capabilities for a specific hierarchical data base. OTSS was designed to operate on any hierarchical data base regardless of its structure and regardless of the data fields stored in the data base. Retrieval processes are available to print, alter, rank, plot, distribute, compute statistics, and perform regression analysis of data. These processes are specified to OTSS in a key-word English-like language in an interactive dialogue environment. OTSS allows for simple alteration of the retrieval process from request to request by selective replacement, deletion, or addition of statements to the dialogue description of the process to be performed. As part of the package, OTSS provides a data-base-independent security mechanism. This mechanism allows a data base administrator to restrict access or alteration of a data base and use of certain process 1743