language: en

An Object-Oriented Approach to Interoperation of Heterogeneous Information Sources

Ling Liu 1 and Calton Pu 2
1 University of Alberta,
Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2H1 Canada
email: lingliu@cs.ualberta.ca
2 Oregon Graduate Institute,
Portland, Oregon 97291-1000 USA
email: calton@cse.ogi.edu

Abstract. In the modern Internet environment, various types of data sources have become accessible, including multimedia data and web pages. Some of the fundamental assumptions in traditional databases, such as the existence of a global schema and data consistency maintained by a Data Base Administrator, are no longer true in many of the new data sources. We outline the DIOM [LP95b] object-oriented approach to build interoperable heterogeneous information systems despite the absence of global schema and the presence of data inconsistency. We describe the metadata catalog management component of DIOM, a key service in the support for interoperation among heterogeneous information sources. To support a flexible and customizable conection between information consumers and information producers, DIOM metadata catalog development utilizes the adaptive specification mechanisms, provided in DIOM interface description language, for explicit description of information consumers' domain query requirements and for object-oriented abstractions of information producers' information sources.

1 Introduction