Accession Number:

AD0711380

Title:

AN INFORMATION ORGANIZER FOR COORDINATING MODULAR PROGRAMS.

Descriptive Note:

Civil engineering studies,

Corporate Author:

ILLINOIS UNIV URBANA DEPT OF CIVIL ENGINEERING

Personal Author(s):

• Hatfield,Frank J.
• Fenves,Steven J.

Report Date:

1970-07-01

Pagination or Media Count:

171.0

Abstract:

The purpose of the Information Organizer is to facilitate utilization of a secondary storage device as a medium for communication of data between programs. The Information Organizer provides a standard, self-documented data structure suitable for input and output by a wide range of engineering programs, together with variables, arrays, and subroutines for manipulating the structure. The structure is conceptually a set of hierarchically nested tables. A row-column intersection of a table may contain either a word of data or a nested table. Associated with each column of a table, and therefore with the data or tables nested into that column, is an alphameric label. The column labels, which reside in secondary storage with the data, serve both as a data directory and as mnemonic documentation of the structure. The Information Organizer provides facilities for creating and deleting rows and columns, for sorting and indexing the rows of a table, for addressing columns by label, and for addressing rows by either value or position. The frequency of relatively slow retrievals of secondary storage records is minimized by retaining in primary storage previously retrieved records in anticipation of future needs according to a strategy based on the number and currency of each record.

Descriptors:

• (*COMPUTER PROGRAMMING
• INFORMATION RETRIEVAL)
• DATA STORAGE SYSTEMS
• CIVIL ENGINEERING

Subject Categories:

• Computer Programming and Software
• Computer Hardware

Distribution Statement:

APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE