Introduction

The EUEDOS DataBase Manager (DBM) has been a concerted effort under the auspices of the EUI-Net as a bridge between European Educational Initiatives and their relation to 21^st century employment schemes. Having the ambition to be an international system that interconects educational and employment databases, it is designed to use two major units: A Vertical Unit which is planned to be used from educational institutes and an Horizontal Units which is planned to be used from national organizations. A number of Vertical Units, equal to the number of participated national educational institutes are connected with a national Vertical Unit. Then Vertical Units are also interconnected, composing an international system (fig.A).

Fig. A

The basic model proposed interleaves a synergy between a set of "vertical" institutional databases and a set of "horizontal" -or national databases, acting as an "aggregator" of workforce profiles hosted from

Major Features

EUEDOS DataBase Manager (DBM) has been designed so as to satisfy two basic assumptions:

The integrated model of EUEDOS DataBase Manager (DBM) cannot be applied at once. It will be applied gradually.
The members of EUEDOS DataBase Manager (DBM) (institutes) cannot be strictly consistent to a concrete policy.

The first assumption implies that the basic module of EUEDOS DataBase Manager (DBM) (vertical unit) must be able to work as an autonomous unit either it belongs to a horizontal unit or not. Hence the Vertical EUEDOS DataBase Manager (DBM) Module has functions that concern the operation of the unit as an autonomous web application, and other functions as a node of a grid network. If a Vertical Unit hasn't been interconnected with an Horizontal Unit then all grid network functions are inactive. Another consequence of the first assumption is that the connection of a Vertical EUEDOS DataBase Manager (DBM) Module to an EUEDOS DataBase Manager (DBM) system under the coordination of a Horizontal module can be done at any moment.
The second assumption implies that the affiliation of a vertical module shouldn't prevent the owner institute to design it's database according to its own needs. To the direction of absolute freedom the administrators of vertical module are able to create their own database from scratch and with no restrictions. On the other hand, such a feature may become a disadvantage when the owner institute doesn't afford the necessary time and human resources for such a task. Hence the EUEDOS DataBase Manager (DBM) vertical module proposes a middle course by offering a minimum predifined database schema that has been planned from experts and approved from the national organization. The predifined database schema concerns just two information entities essential for EUEDOS DataBase Manager (DBM) functionality: One is the undergraduate and graduate students (workforce) entity and the other is the employers database. The adoption of the predifined database schema must be considered as the best solution for an institute when istalls EUEDOS DataBase Manager (DBM) Vertical Unit. Then the administrators can complement these information entities or add new entities according to their wishes. This way even though the various institutional (vertical) databases are in general different they are homogeneous in some degree (the essential to the system two information entities).

Fig. B

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