Database interoperability through state based logical data independence

Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) involv-ing business-to-business transactions depends more and more upon database interoperability. The design of inter-business CSCW when the businesses are already operating independent systems depends either upon effective reverse engineering (to properly discover the semantics underlying each organisation’s systems and through that to develop ap-propriate matches for interbusiness software), or upon suf-ficiently rich semantic models and good database manage-ment system support for logical data independence (to al-low database updating through a logical view). This paper takes the second approach presenting a rich semantic data model that the authors have been developing and have used successfully in a number of major consultancies, and a new approach to logical data independence and view updatabil-ity based on that model. We show how these approaches support database interoperability for business-to-business transactions, and, for CSCW within an organisation, how they support federated databases