Object Discovery and Uni cation in Federated Database Systems

A key challenge in sharing oriented information management environments such as networks of heterogeneous autonomous database systems is to provide capabil ities to allow information units and resources to be exibly and dynamically com bined and interconnected while at the same time preserving the investment in and the autonomy of each individual component The research described here speci cally focuses on two key aspects of this how to discover the location and content of relevant nonlocal information units and how to identify and resolve the semantic heterogeneity that exists between related information in di erent database compo nents Our approach serves as a basis for the sharing of related concepts through partial meta data conceptual schema uni cation without the need for a global view of data We demonstrate and evaluate our approach using the Remote Exchange ex perimental prototype system which supports information sharing and exchange from the above perspective