WebDAV-Based Distributed Authoring of Databases (WEBDAD)

Recently many applications and much software has been provided to support distributed authoring of file systems (files and directories) based on WebDAV (protocol for Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning). WebDAV claims to handle any resource accessible using a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). However, there is a lack of applications which support distributed authoring of databases using WebDAV. This arises because the WebDAV methods are mostly intended to operate on files and directories. This paper investigates the issues of distributed authoring of databases based on the WebDAV protocol, and provides a standard way of authoring databases, whether relational or object-oriented, via the Internet. Indeed, we use WebDAV advantages such as metadata and access control to present database metadata in a standardized way via WebDAV properties. The access control presents control on databases via WebDAV permissions, and improves that access control, e.g. down to the level of individual records rather than just tables. A prototype system has been implemented with the help of the Jakarta Slide package.