PolySPIN: Support for Polylingual Persistence, Interoperability and Naming in Object-Oriented Databases

Heterogeneity in information systems gives rise to a range of interoperability problems. For heterogeneous information systems based on traditional database technology, the dominant interoperability problems are multiple database (or schema) integration and multilingual access to individual databases. While similar interoperability problems can arise in heterogeneous information systems based on objectoriented database (OODB) technology, the nature of this new technology introduces new possibilities for heterogeneity and concomitant new interoperability problems. In particular, a given object-oriented database may contain data objects originally defined, created and persistently stored using the capabilities provided by several distinct programming languages, and an application may need to uniformly process those data objects. We call such a database polylingual and term the corresponding interoperability problem the polylingual access problem. While many of today's OODBs support multi..