The Jupiter system: an environment for multidatabase interoperability

Abstract

The goal of the Jupiter system is to provide interoperability services to a federation of autonomous and possibly heterogeneous database systems. Interoperability is the ability to connect software systems in a manner which facilitates transparent access to enterprise data resources, which may be distributed among legacy applications across multiple heterogeneous software and hardware platforms. The participants are free to withdraw at any time, with the result that global integration of the participant schemas is not seen as a feasible solution. Our solution is to provide a multidatabase layer and a suitable interoperator language to allow information providers to construct loosely-coupled interoperable autonomous information systems. The enor mous problems faced by information system providers are compounded by the difficulty of integrating key applications which have been developed using traditional methods with applications developed using, for example, object- oriented technology. A goal of our research is to address the area of multidatabase interoperability and, to this end, we have constructed the Jupiter prototype.