The COIL Project: A Common Object Interconnection Language to Support Database Integration and Evolution1

The COIL Project is an effort to design a module interconnection language specifically for managing database integration and evolution. This project is a significant part of a larger effort to build a database integration and evolution environment called Sanctuary. COIL will make a significant contribution to module interconnection language research by providing interface symmetry, application-level module composition, and syntactic analysis capabilities for systems constructed with the Object Management Group’s Common Object Request Broker Technology (CORBA). Since CORBA is the state-of-the-art in distributed, object-based technologies, and since it has been adopted by over 800 software vendors, software developers and end users, this research will have immediate and high impact. This paper presents a discussion of the motivation, background, and fundamental module interconnection language issues and goals for the COIL project.