A FRAMEWORK FOR OBJECT MATCHING IN FEDERATED DATABASES AND ITS IMPLEMENTATION

Manufacturing industries have recently started exploring the potential for sharing information across inter-organization database systems to increase productivity and gain strategic advantages. As manufacturing information is not well structured such systems bring together a dive rse variety of databases that transcend organizational boundaries to i nclude customers and suppliers. In this paper, we present a framework for object matching that uses rules and approximation schemes to suppo rt transparent user access to such heterogeneous databases. In the sec ond part of the paper, we discuss how object matching can be implement ed in an extensible DBMS. Several implementation options are described using the features supported by POSTGRES.