An Infrastructure to Manage Resources

Abstract

One of the more diffuse problems with information technology (IT) is that both users and their IT-supporters and IT-administrators have the feeling that IT leads to more work to be done. Since the boom of the WWW this got even worse. On one hand we have an easy way of making information available, on the other hand we have all the maintenance work with it. The problem is that much of the information to be published on the web actually already exists somewhere else, just not in the right format. This leads to additional work, inconsistency and other well known problems.

During 1999 I built a prototype to try out some ideas that should help me to manage these problems. The background for my work and this paper is practical. But through the last years my interest in a general understanding of this problem has increased. This position statement is meant both as a status and as a starting point.