Ubiquity and need-to-know: two principles of data distribution

A theoretical and an implementation oriented research project1) 2) with respect to data distribution in Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) revealed a fundamental problem of data management, treated introductory and in some detail, but not basically in a series of papers (1), (2), (3), (4). Data requirements in highly adaptive manufacturing areas are entirely different froth more conservative applications in the service business (banking, insurance, traffic, public administration, etc.). Two categories may be distinguished: • the principle of ubiquity and • the needto-know principle It is a primary application design decision in distributed systems to determine according to what principle data consumers and data producers exchange their data entities. The technical problem is how to support comprehensively both principles by a distributed data management systems.