Designing with databases

January, 2003

In spite of the progress we've made over the last decade in connecting people and documents, we still have a long way to go. Readers spend too much time and effort finding, evaluating, and tracking. Authors, teachers, and other content creators are still forced to work in a segmented environment where print, Web, and database genres co-exist but don't mesh well. The upshot is Web publications that lack editorial oversight, print publications that lack interactivity, and databases that serve only a single application.

This article explores the role of "desktop" databases in helping content creators design a more comprehensive and efficient reader experience. First we evaluate the effectiveness of various authoring tools in providing answers to typical questions posed by readers. Then we highlight the pros and cons of strategies to add database capabilities to the author's toolkit. Finally, we discuss our own authoring toolkit and its benefits.

We intentionally use the terms "reader" and "user" interchangeably because the vocabulary illustrates the problem. We like the phrase "information ecology" to describe the system and "knowledge base publishing" to describe the creation process, but we have no word that adequately describes the intended beneficiaries.

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