An Object-Oriented Approach to Interoperation of Heterogeneous Information Sources

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 LP b object oriented approach to build interoperable heterogeneous information systems despite the absence of global schema and the presence of data inconsistency We de scribe the metadata catalog management component of DIOM a key ser vice in the support for interoperation among heterogeneous information sources To support a exible and customizable conection between infor mation consumers and information producers DIOM metadata catalog development utilizes the adaptive speci cation mechanisms provided in DIOM interface description language for explicit description of infor mation consumers domain query requirements and for object oriented abstractions of information producers information sourcesions of information producers information sources