Adaptive web-based database communities

The evolution into the global information infrastructure and the concomitant increase in the available information on the Web, is offering a powerful distribution vehicle for organizations that need to coordinate the use of multiple information sources. However, the technology to organize, search, integrate, and evolve these sources has not kept pace with the rapid growth of the available information space. In this chapter, we present our work in the WebFINDIT project. WebFINDIT aims to achieve the scalable integration and efficient querying of Web-accessible databases through the incremental data-driven discovery and formation of interrelationships between information sources. WebFINDIT uses an ontological organization of the information space to filter interactions and accelerate service searches. More precisely, the information space is organized as domain-specific groups. Each group forms a database community to represent the domain of interest of the related databases. Additionally, WebFINDIT provides a monitoring mechanism to dynamically alter relationships between different database communities. This is achieved by using distributed agents that work as background processes. They continually gather and evaluate information about the intercommunity relationships to recommend changes. A prototype has been fully implemented in the context of a healthcare application.