PUTTING LEGACY DATA ON THE WEB - A REPOSITORY DEFINITION LANGUAGE

The objective of InfoHarness is to provide integrated and rapid access to huge amounts of heterogeneous legacy information through WWW brows ers. This is achieved with the help of metadata that contains informat ion about the type, representation, and location of physical data. The proposed InfoHarness Repository Definition Language (IRDL) aims to si mplify the metadata generation process. It provides high flexibility i n associating typed logical information units with portions of physica l data and in defining relationships between these units. The proposed stable abstract class hierarchy provides support for statements of th e language that introduce new data types, as well as new indexing tech nologies.