The Network as a Global Database: Challenges of Interoperability, Proactivity, Interactiveness, Legacy

The current integrated developments in network and computing give rise to a technical infrastructure for the information society which one may variously circumscribe by terms such as ubiquitous computing, telepresence and the network as one giant global database. The paper applies to the network the metaphor of global database, and subsumes the aspects of ubiquity and telepresence under it. It should then be possible to preserve many of the existing database techniques and to concentrate on adjusting these to the network information infrastructure. The paper explores four challenges for adjustment: interoperability due to heterogeneous data repositories, proactivity due to autonomy of data sources, interactiveness due to the need of short-term and task-specific interaction and cooperation, and legacy due to the fitting of old systems to the networked environment. Based on several application projects and exemplary solutions, the paper claims as its experiences that objectorientation provides a natural framework for meeting the challenges, but must also draw on the combined resources of databases, data communications, and software engineering. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made OP distributed for direct commercial advantage, the VLDB copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Very Large Data Base Endowment. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or special permission from the Endowment. Proceedings of the 23rd VLDB Conference Athens, Greece, 1997 Forschungszentrum Informatik (FZI) Haid-und-Neu-Str. lo-14 D-76131 Karlsruhe, Germany