The Biological Sciences Division Office of Academic Computing (BSDAC)
at the University of Chicago is the primary resource for support and
development of instructional and research computing applications in the
biomedical sciences. Driven by the goal to unify traditionally isolated
teaching, research and clinical computing resources, the group has
initiated a broad scale development effort known as the Phoenix Project.
The aim of the Phoenix Project is to develop an integrated academic information system providing full Internet connectivity and wide-area distributed hypermedia authoring services to the students, teachers, researchers, clinicians, and administrators who comprise BSDAC's user base. While the World-Wide-Web and its underlying data standards, HTML+ and HTTP, provide a flexible and yet powerful foundation for such a computing environment, they also present, in their current implementations, two significant limitations with respect to distributed hypermedia authoring: the lack of a user-friendly cross-platform HTML authoring tool, and rudimentary wide-area authentication/ authorization service integration. Our development effort over the past nine months has thus been twofold: to develop an effective X-windows based WYSIWYG HTML browser/editor, and to construct a prototype for integrated wide-area authentication and authorization support for HTTP service.
In this paper, we outline the design principles and application features present in the Phoenix software environment. We also present selected examples of how our user base is applying Phoenix utilities to further the Division's tripartite mission of advancing research, education, and patient care. Finally, we suggest improvements to current WWW-based standards, and describe future directions for Phoenix development efforts.
m-lavenant@uchicago.eduJohn Kruper, M.Sc., D.A. Director of Academic Computing Division of Biological Sciences Lecturer Biological Sciences Collegiate Division University of Chicago 924 E. 57th Street Chicago, IL 60637-5415 (phone) (312) 702-4520 (fax) (312) 702-2280 (internet) j-kruper@uchicago.edu