The eXtensible Information Management Architecture (XIMA) enables universal client access to the OMS Java data management system
through a clear separation of content and presentation and has been developed in the Global Information Systems (GlobIS)
research group at ETH Zurich. The access layer is based around an XML server and the use of XSLT templates for output
generation. XIMA currently supports HTML, WML, CHTML and regular telephones using speech recognition and synthesis (VoiceXML).
Responses can be customised and the system is flexible in supporting new types of client devices.
Fig. 1: XIMA architecture
A major goal of XIMA was to support application development through rapid prototyping and refinement. Generic browsers
enable all information objects to be accessed by the set of supported client devices automatically based on default
presentation templates. For XIMA’s generic object browser, the appropriate XSLT stylesheets for different media
output channels can be reused by future applications. In the case a content object is not available in the format
requested by the client device, the request is delegated to a Media Transcoder component which automatically
transforms an existing content object to the appropriate format.
Fig. 2: Output devices
The XIMA framework has been used to develop various applications. A community diary was implemented that manages
the scheduling of group events as well as personal diaries and deploys the information on desktop browsers, mobile phones
and regular phones based on a speech interface. In another project, it has been used to build an advanced telephone service
for the dissemination of avalanche forecasts for the Swiss Alps. As part of our solution for interactive paper the XIMA
framework has been extended to support paper as a new input/output device and integrate physical and digital information.
Aural Interfaces to Databases Based on VoiceXML,
Beat Signer, Moira C. Norrie, Peter Geissbuehler and Daniel Heiniger,
Proceedings of VDB6, 6th IFIP Workshop on Visual Database Systems,
Brisbane, Australia, May 2002
Available:
2001
Java Framework for Database-centric Web Engineering,
Beat Signer, Michael Grossniklaus and Moira C. Norrie,
Proceedings of WebE 2001, 4th Workshop on Web Engineering (in conjunction with 10th International World Wide Web Conference),
Hong Kong, May 2001
