Providing Uniform Access to Heterogeneous Information Bases

We propose the use of object-oriented database management systems (OODBMSs) as tools for providing coordinated access to distributed, heterogeneous, autonomous information bases. The extensible nature of an OODBMS, i.e., the provision for abstract data types and operations, makes it feasible to write interfaces to a wide variety of existing information sources and that way create the illusion of a single integrated database which can be queried in a uniform manner. We illustrate the approach in terms of the Iris OODBMS.