Intranet of a research institution
Akhlyostin A.Yu., Babikov Yu.L., Fazliev A.Z.
Institute of Atmospheric Optics SB RAS, 1 Akademichesky Ave., Tomsk, RUSSIA
E-mail: lexa@iao.ru, ylb@iao.ru, faz@iao.ru 

Intranet is an information system designed to pool various information resources, oriented at information support of scientific and organizational activity of institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and using the Internet technology.
	Intranet uses an information base (IB) based on the concept of a plane document warehouse and an arbitrary set of document collections grouped as a hierarchic structure. According to this concept, all documents in the Intranet are stored as a single database table – data warehouse. The subset of table records selected by certain criteria is called an archive. A collection is a hierarchically ordered random-depth structure containing references to records of the document warehouse. Collections may be both public and private, i.e., created by a user and accessible to only him/her. The use of this concept has allowed us to unify the software and to integrate various applications.
	Three types of Intranet applications with different degree of integration with IB can be distinguished:
•	General-purpose services not interacting with IB (scheduler, notebook, forum);
•	Subject collections constructed in IB (topical bulletin boards, collections of photo and video documents, software, simple-structure hand-books, private collections);
•	Applications using their own databases (electronic library, subsystems for supporting scientific and organizational activity, personnel department). Documents generated by these applications are stored in the document warehouse and can be included in both public and private collections.
The Intranet architecture consists of the kernel and applications. The kernel is responsible for authorizing user and providing access, controlling display of information as information portal, and starting applications. The kernel and applications communicate with each other using a set of environment variables.

[1] Akhlyostin A.Yu., Babikov Yu.L., Krutikov V.A., Fazliev A.Z.,  “Design of the corporative scientific communications media in Tomsk Scientific Center” in: Proceedings of the II All-Russian Scientific Conference “Digital Libraries: Advanced Methods And Technologies, Digital 
Collections “, Protvino (2000), pp. 19-26.