A meta-level active multidatabase system architecture for heterogeneous information resources

With the rapid progress of global network and database technology, various information resources, such as relational databases, document databases and web contents, have become accessible over networks. The integration among those information resources adds new values to themselves. An active multidatabase system is essential to provide dynamic access and integration functions for those information resources. This paper presents a principled architecture of a meta-level active multidatabase system that provides active database functionalities for accessing and integrating heterogeneous information resources. The meta-level active multidatabase system realizes active rules that check and react to changes of contents in different information resources on the global-area network. The essence of our method is that active database functionalities and database integration mechanisms are realized in the meta-level system over local information resources. Our method applies the active database functionalities to heterogeneous information resources to access and integrate them in a dynamic way. In this paper, we clarify feasibility and effectiveness of our system architecture by showing several experimental results.