Scientific and technical databases

Access to relevant information has become an essential issue for all participants in economic and technical life, given the intense competitiveness that characterizes their relationships.

Nearly twenty-five years after the first scientific and technical databases (in the fields of medicine, aeronautics and chemistry) were made available online, the situation of production, access and use of these databases has changed significantly since the last quarter of the twentieth century.

• From an organizational point of view, after a significant increase in the number of databases in the various European countries, achieved without a common server development policy, professional information has become a veritable information industry. The acceleration of purchases, sales and mergers between different operators has led to major horizontal and vertical concentration movements worldwide:

  • horizontal concentration between server organizations, almost all of which offer multidisciplinary information: scientific and technical, business, press, etc. ;

  • vertical concentration, in particular between producer and server, giving the producer a more complete, or even exclusive, distribution of its products in terms of sources, nature of information and anteriority.

• On a technical level, developments enable different modes of access and use, which need to be integrated to obtain a more efficient service from complementary elements:

  • videotex access to databanks in France with the different tariff levels of kiosk access ;

  • local use of large volumes of data on CD-ROM and development of multimedia: text, images, animated sequences and sound;

  • use of microcomputers for online access to professional servers and Internet services: increased transmission speeds, access to data via the Internet and use of search methods for information available on the networks, questioning of traditional pricing methods.

    Faced with these organizational and technical changes, the user's choice today is not the same as it was fifteen years ago. Back then, the user would choose the server(s) containing the databases best suited to his needs. Today, the user creates a specific, coherent product from the numerous, heterogeneous data elements on offer.

    This is clearly the case for the metrology and measurement sector, for which there are very few databases (see § 4.1. Sectors of activity), and for which it will...