An Architecture for Homogenizing Federated Databases

Many large organizations have a number of heterogeneous localized databases that are maintained and managed to support a set of local applications. One of the main difficulties in supporting global applications over a number of localized databases and migrating legacy ISs to modern computing environment is to cope with the heterogeneities of these systems. We propose a novel flexible architecture (HODFA) to dynamically connect these localized heterogeneous databases in forming a homogenized federated database system and to support the process of transforming a collection of heterogeneous information systems onto a homogeneous environment. We further develop an incremental methodology of homogenization in the context of our HODFA framework, which can facilitate different degrees of homogenization in a stepwise manner.