A framework and test-suite for assessing approaches to resolving heterogeneity in distributed databases

The problem of connecting together a number of different databases to produ ce an integrated information system has attracted a considerable amount of attention over the years and various approaches have been developed to hand le this. However, the general problem of gathering related information from a number of existing heterogeneous databases is complex because of the dif ferences in representation and meaning of data in different data sets. Many different approaches have been described to resolve this problem, and some prototype systems built. However, it is difficult to compare the effective ness of different approaches and prototypes. This paper is aimed at address ing the specific issue of assessing the generality of different approaches. To this end it presents a framework for classifying the differences betwee n data in different databases and a test-suite which can be used to evaluat e and compare the extent to which different approaches handle different asp ects of this heterogeneity. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reser ved.