Landscaping the information space of large multi-database networks

The promises of network-accessible information are increasingly difficult t o achieve. These difficulties are due to a variety of causes, such as, the rapid growth in the volume of network-available information and the increas ing complexity, diversity and terminological fluctuations of the different information sources available. This paper presents a conceptual architectur e for the organization information spare across collections of component sy stems in a multidatabase network that provides serendipity, exploration and contextualisation support so that users can achieve logical connections be tween concepts they are familiar with and schema terms employed in multi-da tabase systems. Large-scale searching for multi-database schema information is guided by a combination of lexical, structural and semantic aspects of schema terms in order to reveal more meaning both about the contents of an information term and about its placement within the distributed information space. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.