Ubiquitous Access to Web Databases

Abstract

With the emergence of the Web, there is a need to provide across-the-board transparency for accessing and manipulating data irrespective of platforms, locations, and systems. The challenge is to build an infrastructure to support flexible tools for information space organization, communication facilities, information discovery, content description, and assembly of data from heterogeneous sources. In this chapter, we describe the WebFINDIT system. WebFINDIT builds a scalable and uniform infrastructure for locating and accessing heterogeneous and autonomous databases in large and dynamic environments. One key feature of WebFINDIT is the clustering of Web databases into distributed ontologies. The main advantage of this ontological organization is filtering interactions and reducing the overhead of locating information. Another important feature is the large spectrum of heterogeneity being supported. Heterogeneity appears at different levels, including hardware (Sun and NT), operating system (UNIX and NT), database (Oracle, Informix, DB2, ObjectStore), and communication middleware (CORBA, DCOM, EJB, and RMI).