Advertising database capabilities for information sharing

Abstract

The development of networking technology has resulted in a computing environment which is highly distributed, heterogeneous and dynamic. In order for the autonomous software components in such an environment to share their information, and hence to collaborate with each other, they must be able to advertise their capabilities — that is, to express what they have got to offer — in a form that can be understood by other resources. In this paper, we study the problem of advertising the capabilities of an important class of resources within distributed information systems: namely, databases. We argue that current advertising mechanisms have limitations when applied to database systems, and propose an approach which overcomes these limitations. The resulting advertisement language is flexible and allows database components to advertise their capabilities in botha general and a specific way. We have demonstrated its utility by using it to advertise capabilities within a network of product databases created for Pirelli Cables Ltd.