Supporting dynamic interactions among Web-based information sources

The ubiquity of the World Wide Web offers an ideal opportunity for the depl oyment of highly distributed applications. Now that connectivity is no long er an issue, the attention has turned to providing a middleware infrastruct ure that will sustain data sharing among Web-accessible databases. We prese nt a dynamic architecture and system for describing, locating, and accessin g data from Web-accessible databases. We propose the use of flexible organi zational constructs service links and coalitions to facilitate data organiz ation, discovery, and sharing among Internet-accessible databases. A langua ge is also proposed to support the definition and manipulation of these con structs. The implementation combines Java, CORBA, database API (JDBC), agen t, and database technologies to support a scalable and portable architectur e interconnecting large networks of heterogeneous and autonomous: databases . We report on an experiment to provide uniform access to a Web of healthca re-related databases.