Supporting distributed autonomous information services using coordination

The large quantity and often questionable quality of available information in the information age provides a shaky foundation for decision making by individuals and organizations alike. This has created a tremendous demand for information services which can access, filter, process and present information on an as-needed basis. However, two factors complicate the design of such information services, namely the distributed and the autonomous nature of data sources. This paper reports on the design and implementation of a generic architecture for supporting information services, which meets the above challenge. The architecture adopts concepts from conceptual modeling to offer a transparent description of the information sources' setting and uses active databases techniques to offer a declarative, event-based language for defining coordination rules for integrating distributed information services. Accordingly, the proposed architecture supports two of the most prominent utilities of information services, namely the pre-designed how of operations and the reactive provision of information. In addition to describing the architecture and illustrating its features with an example, the paper presents a prototype implementation and reports on some experimental performance results.