From Distributed Database Management Systems to Cooperative Information Systems: We have the solutions, what are the problems? (Abstract)

Distributed Information Systems have been an area of research for more than 20 years. Although the basic mechanisms and algorithms for distributed database management systems and distributed transaction processing, e.g. distributed query processing and twophase commit were invented rather early, and although also products have been available for more than 10 years, these products are still not used as much as one would expect. The majority of distributed applications today are based upon remote data access and the heterogeneity is dealt with in the application software layer. Similarly, the basic problem of integration of heterogeneous data has been understood rather early in the course of the research on semantic data modelling, and prototype systems have been implemented in several research projects. Nevertheless, although a variety of database gateway products exists in the market for several years already, truly distributed information systems -in the sense of different information sourcesare rather an exception. So the question is why the technology is not in as widespread a use as one would expect. In this talk the reasons for the slow market acceptance will be analysed and the conclusions for future development wil be drawn.