A Framework for Object Matching in Federated Databases and Its Implementation

Manufacturing industries have recently started exploring the potential for sharing information across inter-organization database systems to increase productivity and gain strategic advantages. As manufacturing information is not well structured such systems bring together a diverse variety of databases that transcend organizational boundaries to include customers and suppliers. In this paper, we present a framework for object matching that uses rules and approximation schemes to support transparent user access to such heterogeneous databases. In the second part of the paper, we discuss how object matching can be implemented in an extensible DBMS. Several implementation options are described using the features supported by POSTGRES.