Methodology and case tools for the development of federated databases

Due to the current technological and economical context, there is an increa sing need for cooperating information systems based on federated databases. Though the technical issues of these architectures have been studied for l ong, the way to build them has not triggered as much effort. This paper des cribes a general architecture, a methodology and a CASE environment intende d to address the problem of providing users and programmers with an abstrac t interface to independent heterogeneous and distributed databases. The arc hitecture comprises a hierarchy of mediators and a repository that dynamica lly transform actual data into a virtual homogeneous database and allow cli ent applications to query it. The InterDB approach provides a complete meth odology to define this architecture, including schema recovery through reve rse engineering, database integration and mapping building. The methodology is supported by the DB-MAIN CASE tool that helps developers generate the m ediators and their repository.