Object Exchange Across Heterogeneous Information Sources

. We address the problem of providing integrated access to diverse and dynamic information sources. We explain how this problem differs from the traditional database integration problem and we focus on one aspect of the information integration problem, namely information exchange. We define an object-based information exchange model and a corresponding query language that we believe are well suited for integration of diverse information sources. We describe how the model and language have been used to integrate heterogeneous bibliographic information sources. We also describe two general-purpose libraries we have implemented for object exchange between clients and servers. 1 Introduction A significant challenge facing the database field in recent years has been the integration of heterogeneous databases. Enterprises tend to represent their data using a variety of conflicting data models and schemas, while users want to access all data in an integrated and consistent fashion. There ha..