Tools...

The tools for preparing data and information for dissemination on the World-wide-web and/or CD-ROM disks are the same as those used for any other personal computer work. One needs the basic computer, printer, scanner and means of access to a World-wide-web server and CD-ROM duplicator. Software requirements are word-processing, database, and image-processing applications.

The basic unit of for publishing is a page written in Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). While there are specialized applications, such as PageMill (Adobe), which make preparation of HTML documents easy, they are not necessary. Most of the current versions of the major word-processing packages include HTML as file format, etc. The results of database queries are also formatted as HTML pages. Here knowledge of common graphic interface (CGI) and scripting languages, such as PERL, are necessary. However, there are relatively user-friendly solutions available. One of the best is the Apple Internet Information Server package (Apple), which include TANGO an interface for FileMakerPro.

Most scientific WWW sites provide documentation on how their information is served. Site managers also need to provide their data standards and data models for their databases.