ALLISON, JR., ROBERT EMERSON. Design and Utilization of the Textile and Apparel Business Information System (TABIS): A Data Warehouse for Econometric and Demographic Textile- and Apparel-Related Data. (Under the direction of Moon W. Suh and Trevor J. Little.)
In this research, a unique Textile and Apparel Business Information System (TABIS) was created which can be used to store and access textile- and apparel-related econometric and demographic data from over twenty disparate sources. The system was utilized to perform analyses which could not be done with existing systems.
Creating the TABIS infrastructure entailed converting the data to SAS tables, and custom-programming a menu-based interface, using the C programming language, which prompts the users with simple ASCII menus, generates the necessary SAS/SQL code, and executes the code automatically. The system can be accessed from a variety of computing platforms, including DEC, Sun, and HP workstations. Several unique graphical techniques were also developed to combine and visualize the data.
Samples of the preliminary results, including graphical visualizations and animations of population, employment, and retail apparel sales, can be seen through the TABIS World Wide Web (WWW) home page on the Internet through the following URL:
http://www.tx.ncsu.edu/html/labs/tabis/tabis.html
Note that the original URL (above) is no longer active, but a new website with similar examples is being created at the following location:
http://www.robslink.com/tabis/