Adaptable Web Interfaces for Heterogeneous Data Sources

While the amount of information available over the internet is steadily growing, there is an increasing demand to efficiently and effectively make use of various shared information resources over the World Wide Web (WWW). Ideally, WWW applications should be shielded from the heterogeneous nature of underlying storage systems, and existing data sources should be transparently glued together by relying on a uniform WWW interface. In this paper, we present a new approach to develop a distributed storage system which achieves this goal for application users and additionally allows system developers to dynamically adapt the access to shared information to the needs of new applications. The proposed storage system is based on a new document-oriented storage approach which hides specific storage implementations from the applications using the data, while it is transparently extensible with new functionalities without breaking existing implementations. An example of its use is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of our proposal.