Designing a Macintosh interface to a mainframe database

This work is part of a large project called MIST (Materials Information for Science and Technology) to develop a prototype information system for materials science. In the future, this architecture is expected to provide the basis for a common interface to a network of quasi-autonomous databases. MacMIST, the interface to the database, uses standard Macintosh as well as application-specific paradigms. MIST provides not only raw data, but also extensive metadata, including a thesaurus and glossary, knowledge of class hierarchies, and summaries of what data is currently available. MacMIST supplements users´ a priori knowledge of context and meaning by incorporating such metadata into the interface dynamically. Use of caching and embedded menus facilitates fast and efficient access