| Developing a WWW-based Oracle
Front-End Program for the Medical Signal Database |
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| ZhenHuan Chi(Jane), Simona Crihalmeanu, Lan Guo |
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| The Front-end Program is an application providing
a friendly graphical user interface (GUI) with easy-to-use tools
like buttons, forms, and tables and allowing users to access our
back-end Oracle medical signal database via the Internet. The purpose
of developing such an application is two-fold. First, the Front-end
Program is a window for the Biomedical Signal Analysis Laboratory
(BIOSAL) to share information with the society. By publishing across
the Web, the research data we obtained in the laboratory can become
valuable and utilizable for others. Second, on the internal side,
the Front-End Program facilitates the lab employee, who is not necessarily
familiar with the details of manipulating Oracle database. Thus
the program provides three levels of access. The lab employee has
the full accessibility to the whole database table space and the
full object privileges. General public are allowed viewing only
part of the database, the information we would like to share with
them. WVU students in certain classes can have see more of our database
than general public yet with lot of less privileges than those granted
to the lab employee. We set up Developer 2000 as two-tiered (Figure
1) and Oracle Web Application Server (OWAS) as three-tiered configuration
(Figure 2) in our development. |
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| Figure 1. Configuration of two-tiered structure
(i.e. Developer 2000) |
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| Figure 2. Configuration of three-tiered structure
(i.e. Oracle Application Server) |
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| We install Developer 2000 and OWAS on NT front-end
computers as the “fat client” and application server,
and use HP 9000 as the Database server. All our medical signal database
are stored in HP 9000 as a series of Oracle tables referencing each
other. The key table is the ECG_Signal which records the signal as
Oracle Large Object. The others provide supporting information on
the signal collector, the subject, the location, the property, the
channel information, and the abnormal cardiac events occurred within
the signal sequence. |