InformationWeek

October 20, 1997

Knowledge--In Whatever Form

atabase vendors are positioning universal databases, a new class of database-management system, to play a central role in knowledge-management networks.

IBM, Informix, and Oracle have all introduced variants on the universal database concept. Common to all is the ability to manage data in its many different forms-numbers, letters, documents, spreadsheets, photographs, illustrations, video clips, and sound bites. Vendors say this ability makes a universal database an ideal knowledge-management platform. Typical of these claims are comments by John Bartlett, director of Web product marketing at Informix Software, in Menlo Park, Calif. "Our entire server family is a basis for knowledge management," he says.

Informix's Universal Server, an object relational database introduced in December, can be extend ed by third-party or corporate developers to support virtually any data type. "What companies are looking to do in knowledge management is capture and make available corporate assets," says Bartlett. "Many of those assets are well defined and understood, but many are not."

Despite the ability of universal databases to handle many kinds of multimedia data, text management plays an especially important role in knowledge-management schemes. Oracle, for example, points to its Context Cartridge, a text-management server that works with the Oracle8 database. A wide variety of data forms-including E-mail, product manuals, and documents-can all be searched and summarized in the database with the same security, backup, and recovery capabilities of relational data. "We think it's an important piece of what's been missing in the past," says Felix Litman, Oracle's director of marketing for Context Cartridge.

Also, several Oracle partners are integrating Context with their applications packages, hoping to create somet hing akin to knowledge-management systems for vertical markets. Companies use the bundles to store information in a secure central repository. For instance, COM.sortium in New York bundles Context with its DocuMine software, a Web-based document-management system for use in human resources and sales and marketing departments. And Executech Inc. in Norwalk, Conn., has integrated Context with its E-Tech version 5.0 document-management and document-retrieval software.

Other linkages are in the works, according to Oracle's Litman.

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