A scalable middleware for web databases

The emergence of Web databases has introduced new challenges related to their organization, access, integration, and interoperability. New approaches and techniques are needed to provide across-the-board transparency for accessing and manipulating Web databases irrespective of their data models, platforms, locations, or systems. In meeting these needs, it is necessary to build a middleware infrastructure to support flexible tools for information space organization, communication facilities, information discovery, content description, and assembly of data from heterogeneous sources. In this paper, we describe a scalable middleware for efficient data and application access that we have built using the available technologies. The resulting system is called WebFINDIT. It is a scalable and uniform infrastructure for locating and accessing heterogeneous and autonomous databases and applications.