Abstract

A large-scale interoperable database system operating in a dynamic environment should provide uniform access user interface to its components, scalability to larger networks, evolution of database schema and applications, flexible composability of client and server components, and preserve component autonomy. To address the research issues presented by such systems, we introduce the Distributed Interoperable Object Model (DIOM). DIOM's main features include the explicit repre- sentation of and access to semantics in data sources through the DIOM base interfaces, the use of interface abstraction mechanisms (such as specialization, generalization, aggregation and import) to support incremental design and construction of compound interoperation interfaces, the deferment of conflict resolution to the query submission time instead of at the time of schema integration, and a clean interface between distributed interoperable objects that supports the independent evolution and management of such objects. To make DIOM concrete, we outline the Diorama architecture, which includes important auxiliary services such as domain-specific library functions, object linking databases, and query decomposition and packaging strategies. Several practical examples and appli- cation scenarios illustrate the usefulness of DIOM.

Citations