Towards Interoperable Heterogeneous Information Systems: An Experiment Using the DIOM Approach

The Distributed Interoperable Object Model (DIOM) [19,17] introduced the approach that explicitly defines the interfaces of an information consumer and an information producer, matching them dynamically to achieve interoperability in heterogeneous information systems with growing number of autonomous data sources as components. In this paper, we describe an experimental implementation of a cooperative information system, built on web browser interfaces, the Oracle database manager, and CGI scripts. This initial implementation demonstrates the practical feasibility of building DIOM-based customizable and scalable solutions for interconnecting information consumers with information producers. Highlights of this simple system include: (1) a demonstration of the DIOM query mediation component [17] with interactive query tracing, (2) a generic wrapper construction library, and (3) a demo accessible over the Internet.