The goal of the SPHERE project was to build an informa tion system to archive and query the history of the activity of our Research Centre. Two directions have been explored in this project: the construction of a relational database to store all the information available about this activity since 1980, and the design of generic tools to help to extract both detailed and synthetic information from this database. The different components of the information system are described. A data dictionary approach is used to admin ister and query the database, since its structure is very complex and is subject to continuous evolution and change. Special attention has been given to the processing of textual data: an automatic indexing process structures the textual data by extracting keywords from them, a text linker automatically finds related texts, and a text classifier classifies texts automatically into predefined classifications. The typical use of this database is the joint use of different tools, mainly by the management of the Research Centre. These applications include: finding detailed information about the work done at the Research Centre, computing historical cost aggregates, evaluating the costs of past and forecast work, measuring the changes in the activity between two years, improving the communication between researchers by information filtering, drawing maps of Research Centre activities, and discovering automatically a new organisation chart for the Research Centre. Finally, we point out the problems that remain unsolved, such as enabling a wider group of people to use the system, and give some directions as to how we are currently attempting to solve them.
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