The development of technology is generally a 3-stage process: the replication of a previous process in the new technology; improvements in speed, volume, quality, etc using the new technology; the development of processes, which can only be achieved with the new technology. The application of digital technology to information management enabled the management of the information content to be separated from the management of the media so that the same content could be applied to different media. The development of hyper-linking enabled information to be manipulated and linked in ways that were impossible with non-digital technology. The development of Mark-Up languages has enabled the presentation of information content to be separated from the actual information content. This progression has gone from SGML, through HTML to XML. XML – Extended Mark-up Language enables advanced browser technology to begin to understand the semantics of the information content of diverse data repositories and manage and manipulate it accordingly. The use of XML, JCA and mobile technologies in new information products will be described and demonstrated to illustrate the direction in which future information systems will be developed.

The development of new technology sees an ever increasing pace which is supported by the fact that the new technology advances are made possible by the use of what was previously developed. In other words, it is only possible to advance to the next stage because the development of recent years has been made. This is highlighted by the rapid development of new web technologies brought about by the programming shift that saw a major transition during the early 1990s to create Java and Open Systems techniques. That dawn is today seeing software tools emerge that make possible new ways for the management of complex information shapes. The creation of applications that would hitherto have been difficult to engineer because the fundamental building blocks were not present.

The advantage of scaleable architectures is one element that makes complex arrangement of data possible, by providing the fundamental underpinnings of large data sets that can be organised and managed using RDBMS across multiple domains and organisations. The fact that this no longer even needs to reside in the same place is a feat in itself brought about by the advancing web technology developed in the 1980s. The definition of mark up languages such as HTML and XML and their adoption by the IT industry is equally important. They are not new to librarians who have been using MARC tagging in their libraries for many years but their adoption by the IT community as a whole has transformed the way in which publishing of information is viewed. This change which was brought about primarily for advantage in the production of published documents has itself heralded benefits for the management of information exchange between computers for the benefit of professionals.

Data warehousing has become very big business for many organisations seeking to make sense of their growing banks of data. For information managers who rely on textual information this technology, based largely on numeric data stored in relational databases, has not been able to be applied in the same manner. The mechanisms for making complex ideas stored in unstructured documents link to other data elements and shared with communities across departments or organisational boundaries were and still are for many beyond their reach. This makes the process of harvesting information and in particular, textual and picture information very complex and time consuming.

To overcome the trawl of repositories and the mechanisms of manual indexing of content through intellectual labour new associative technologies are being formed and developed. These are still in their infancy. In the UK the Cabinet Office has funded a number of Pathfinder Projects to pump prime the development of such capabilities through innovative public bodies who are adventurous and needy of such capabilities. This has representation in projects that are handling multi-media digital object repositories and meta data containers as well as systems that are bridging multiple agencies to access and update a patient record where data might exist in each participating agency and is represented in different forms. In both cases the integration of back-end repositories is a significant challenge and the transfer of data and objects and the meta data that goes with them means the technology has to be scaleable, open and capable of implementation without large-scale bespoke software developments.

The technology framework that has been most advanced in its development of the components for this type of integration and interaction is XML and J2EE.