Critical Aspects of Interoperability

For databases to be interoperable, they need to bridge the dissimilarities that exist between their systems. However, in most cases, no a-priori contingency plans are put in place to deal with eventual interoperation. In that respect, there is a need to re-engineer the participating databases to achieve a seamless cooperation. This includes addressing the different aspects of database heterogeneity. Essentially, database heterogeneity can be of many forms (Sheth and Larson, 1990) (Bouguettaya et al., 1995b) (Batini et al., 1986) (Hammer and McLeod, 1993).