Technical details on the OneIS data format
Each Object in OneIS represents something in the real world. It’s simply a list of ‘facts’ about the thing it represents, called Attributes. For example, here’s a very simple object with five attributes:
| Descriptor | Qualifier | Data type | Data |
|---|---|---|---|
| Type | Link | reference of Supplier object | |
| Title | Text | OneIS Ltd | |
| Telephone number | Office | Telephone number | +44 20 7047 1111 |
| Telephone number | Fax | Telephone number | +44 20 7047 1119 |
| Web address (URL) | URL | www.oneis.co.uk |
Looking at each of the columns,
- the Descriptor describes what the attribute means, like the field or column name in traditional databases.
- the optional Qualifier gives a little more information about what it means, a concept borrowed from the Dublin Core metadata standard.
- the Data type and Data are the actual information about the object. OneIS supports a growing number of structured data types.
In addition, there’s a small amount of extra housekeeping information attached:
| Name | Value |
|---|---|
| Object ID | 5 |
| Section ID | 221 |
| Created by | User Name |
| Modified by | User Name |
| Creation times | 2009-03-10T19:20:01 |
| Last modification time | 2009-03-11T10:15:30 |
This gives the object a unique URL. For example,
https://example.infomanaged.co.uk/contact/221-5/oneis-ltd
where
- example.informanaged.co.uk is the web address of the user’s OneIS,
- contact is the name of the section it’s stored in
- 221-5 is the Object Reference formed of the Section ID and Object ID
- oneis-ltd is the ‘slug’, a simple bit of text derived from the Object’s title, so that when a URL is written, you can see what it represents before you click.
Types and titles
OneIS only has one constraint on the object: it must contain at least one Type and at least one Title.
The Type describes what kind of information it represents, for example, a Person, Organisation or an Intranet Page. The basic type is chosen by the user from the list when they click the ADD button, and determines which attributes are presented to the user in the editor.
Types may also have sub-types, for example, an Organisation could be a Partner or a Client. A user can refine the type to one or more subtypes in the editor.
The Title is the field which holds the proper name of the thing being described. It’s called the ‘title’ because it’s the information which would be displayed in the title of a web page. However, in the user interface the attribtue name is renamed as appropriate, for example to ‘Name’ for a Person, to avoid confusing the user. The first title attribute is used when displaying links to the object, for example, in search results.
Sections
Sections group Objects together, so that:
- permissions can be set on subsets of objects, to restrict access as required
- actions can be performed on the set as a whole, for example, syncing contacts to Outlook
- search subsets can be created, to restrict the search to certain parts of the store, or exclude some information by default
Data types
OneIS supports a growing number of expressive data types. These allow structured data to be captured accurately, and include
- Link to other object
- Text (single line, multi-line or paragraph)
- Document text (formatted, for intranet pages)
- Person’s name
- Postal address
- Postcode
- Email address
- Telephone number
- Web address (URL)
- Date
- File (with full text indexing of most common formats)
Where OneIS provides a data type, it implements special input fields for accurate data entry, and displays and processes the information appropriately. For example, person’s name attributes separate the various fields, like first and last name, and can be configured to handle western and eastern naming style. Telephone numbers separate country, number and extension, and then reformat the number so it reads as it would be dialed from the phone on your desk.
The most important data type is the link to another object. This simple concept gives OneIS a huge amount of power, described in Semantic web. When viewing an object, a link is displayed as a hyperlink to the linked object. Links are also used to list the associated objects, which are simply those objects linking to the displayed object.
Simplicity is power
The OneIS data structure is very simple, but very flexible. By matching the native information handling of the system to the information found in the real world, OneIS is able to understand an organisation’s data to give great search results, browsing and discovery of relevant, useful information.