A SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL DATA INTEGRATION METHOD FOR HETEROGENEOUS DATABASE ENVIRONMENTS
Naoki Ishibashi, Yoshihide Hosokawa, Yasushi Kiyoki · 2001
By creating an interconnection mechanism among a lot of legacy databases, the values of those databases gain significantly. To interconnect heterogeneous legacy databases with a conventional approach, as computing various inter-relationships like equality, synonymity, similarity or topology, it is necessary to implement static and explicit pattern descriptions which represent various inter-relationships. However, the overhead of the static description is not ignorable specially in the global area network where many legacy databases are connected. There are many systems for computing various relationships among local data items. Those systems have their own application scopes, and an integration framework for those methods is not established. In this paper, we present a data integration method for the meta-level system which interconnects heterogeneous databases by computing spatial and temporal inter-relationships dynamically. This method also integrates heterogeneous computational systems in the metalevel system. The application scope of this method can be expanded through hybridization of several systems for computing relationships among data items. The feature of the method is to realize data integration among heterogeneous databases by computing spatial and temporal relationships context-dependently. Keyword: database integration, multidatabase system, distributed databases, temporal database system, spatial database system