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D P I E n o. 13 
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Museum and University Data, Program and Informa tio n Exchang e 
{Editor's note—Harriet R. Meadow, of the Flora North America 
Staff, Department of Botany, National Museum of Natural History, 
Washington, D. C. 20560, has been preparing surveys of various 
information systems for the use of the FNA Secretariat. While 
these summaries are informal, and were not written for general 
distribution, I think they are of considerable interest, and 
those of the series I consider of particular significance to 
MUDPIE readers will be included in this and following issues. 
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INFORMATION SYSTEMS SURVEY 
"GIPSY" 
[General Information Processing System] 
The GIPSY system is a generalized information processing 
package which provides facility for creating, maintaining and 
querying fielded files of data. A high level user language is 
provided. It was written in assembly language for the IBM 360 
and operates under full OS in either batch or teleprocessing 
mode. The 1050 or 2741 may be used as the teleprocessing 
terminal. 
The system was built at the University of Oklahoma under Dr. 
James Sweeney with partial support from the federal government. 
It is currently operational, is available at no cost to selected 
users, and is generally available as a rental product. 
The system does not provide for use of data element value 
dictionaries either as input validation devices or as query 
expansion devices. 
FILE ORGANIZATION -- Data files are stored on disk in a 
sequential mode. Records are variable length; each may be 
composed of a variable number of variable length fields. A 
field consists of a tag or identifier followed by a data value 
or a text expression. No hierarchical organization of data 
fields is provided. No repeating fields are allowed. 
The content of each data file is described to the system so 
that users of the system need be concerned only with the logical 
organization of their data and may refer to data items by their 
names. They need not be aware of physical storage of the data 
within the co mp uter. 
FILE CREATION -- GIPSY uses a utility program to create a 
new data file from card images, based upon the file description 
previously stored in the system. During this process syntactic 
error analysis is performed but no error analysis of content is 
provided. 
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