A framework for uniform access to data, software and knowledge

Abstract

An object-oriented framework is presented that offers integration of various types of entities at one workstation. Five types of entities are distinguished: data, knowledge, functions, presentation forms and hardware, and for each of these entities an 'accessor' is introduced. An accessor offers abstraction from the particularities of access to the entities. For the interaction with this framework a programming language has been defined. A restricted form of the framework has been used to implement a prototype medical workstation for the support of clinical data analysis.