Towards Information Brokering: an ‘intelligent’ Database Navigation and Management System

In a ‘real-world’ database application the need to make available data according to the user’s requirements is very real. For that matter, the true measure of the efficacy of a database system is its ability to provide ‘intelligent’ database navigation mechanisms that can handle complex user queries for extracting pertinent and useful data from a database. Here, we propose a database application -‘Information Broker’ -an ‘intelligent’ database access engine that incorporates artificial intelligence (AI) based ‘intelligent’ database navigation mechanisms. We introduce a shift from the flat structure of a database towards envisaging a database as a hierarchical structure; by way of a user-defined virtual hierarchy various profiles of the same database can be viewed. The incorporation of a virtual hierarchy paves the way for a novel database navigation mechanism, which is both intuitive and easy to use.