Webfindit: Providing data and service-centric access through a scalable middleware

The ubiquity of the World Wide Web facilitates the deployment of highly distributed applications. The emergence of Web databases and applications has introduced new challenges related to their organization, access, integration, and interoperability. We present a dynamic architecture and system for describing, locating, and accessing data from Web databases and applications. We describe a scalable middleware for efficient data and application access that we have built using the available technologies. The resulting system is called WebFJNDIT It is a scalable and uniform infrastructure for accessing heterogeneous and autonomous databases and applications.