When records are accessed by the system, they are represented in their local, or native format. This might be SGML or HTML files, News or Mail archives, MARC records. If the system doesn't already know how to read the type of data you need to store, you can set up an input filter by preparing conversion rules based on regular expressions and possibly augmented by a flexible scripting language (Tcl). The input filter produces as output an internal representation, a tree structure.

When records are processed by the system, they are represented in a tree-structure, constructed by tagged data elements hanging off a root node. The tagged elements may contain data or yet more tagged elements in a recursive structure. The system performs various actions on this tree structure (indexing, element selection, schema mapping, etc.),

Before transmitting records to the client, they are first converted from the internal structure to a form suitable for exchange over the network - according to the Z39.50 standard.