A Model for Heterogeneous Distributed Database Systems

The provision of access to autonomous heterogeneous distributed information sources (including databases) is becoming of increasing importance in most aspects of daily life. It has been the subject of intensive research for at least a decade, yet the solutions published to date have addressed only parts of the problem and have, in general, failed to provide an acceptable solution. We believe the problem can be rendered tractable by reconciliation of equivalent layers of information in the sources. We propose a new 5-layer model representing information richness or expressivity to assist in the integration of heterogeneous distributed database systems. The model has been used in a current ESPRIT project (MIPS), which utilises an embedded KBS to assist in query reformulation and answer construction when accessing heterogeneous distributed information sources, and shown to be useful.

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