Advances in wide area networking is making the goal of achieving a worldwide interoperable database system closer than ever. Because of the large environment, new problems have surfaced that need to be addressed. We distinguish several reasons for a new design approach. Traditional approaches like global integration and federated approaches are better suited to small and medium scale heterogeneous databases. In a large network of interoperable autonomous heterogeneous databases, the architecture should be flexible enough to allow negotiation to take place to establish grouping of databases. In such a large environment, it is important that databases be made aware of other participating databases in an incremental fashion. Further, users should be educated about the space of information in an incremental and dynamic fashion. These goals are to be achieved under the major assumptions that participating databases keep their autonomy intact as much as possible and that the overhead in brid...

The Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) have elicited the explosion of accessible data repositories. Because high connectivity is now a reality, the challenge has been to take advantage of it to enable data sharing in a cost-effective way. Any proposed architecture would have to allow dynamic couplings of heterogeneous databases based on their content and interest. We propose an implementation using CORBA and Web technologies as a distributed infrastruture and platform to support the dynamic interconnection of heterogeneous and autonomous databases on the Web. 1 Introduction The single most important development in the computer industry while we approach the year 2000, is the deployment of the Internet [1] and the World Wide Web (WWW) [2]. This has been particularly enabled by the mammoth advances achieved in high speed networking [3]. As a result, the need to share data across autonomous heterogeneous databases has now become a necessity. Organizations all over the world rely on a...

In this paper we present a model that supports a clean separation between the concepts of interface, implementation, and representation. We present several problems that are difficult to solve in the absence of such separation and describe how the proposed model can be used to provide a solution. We also describe the principles that can be used to implement the proposed model in an existing object-oriented database management system. 1 Introduction In the past two decades, object-oriented technology has been extensively used in design and development of database management systems. This technology has been introduced to meet the challenging requirements posed by current applications. One of the major advantages of object-oriented software technology is its strong support for code reuse. While code reuse is important in application programs, it is even more important in database programming. Data stored in many databases far outlives the application programs originally written to pro...

We describe an architecture called WebFINDIT allows dynamic couplings of Web accessible databases based on content and interest. We propose an implementa- tion using WWW, Java, JDBC, and that communicate via the IIOP protocol. The combi- nation of these technologies offers a compelling middleware infrastructure to implement wide-area enterprise applica- tions. In addition to a discussion of core concepts and implementalion architecture, we also discuss an experience of using WebFINDIT in a appli- cation.