An object-oriented approach to federated databases

Work on object-oriented database and programming technology has resulted in a number of important and powerful concepts and mechanisms, not only essential for modeling and implementing next generation database systems, but also useful for designing and constructing a network of distributed, autonomous databases (e.g. a federated database architecture). By applying the concept of 'object' to database level, many of the associated mechanisms can be adopted and extended naturally, so as to accommodate the desired sharing and exchange of information among databases. The authors describe such an 'object-oriented' approach towards federating a collection of decentralized, heterogeneous databases, and examines several issues that must be addressed within such an environment.<>