A rule-based query processor for a heterogeneous object-oriented database environment-overview

Interoperability between heterogeneous database systems has become one of the major research challenges. Research efforts over the last two decades were focused on the relational model. However, the advent of the object-oriented model and its rich semantics could provide new solutions for some old research problems. This paper describes a research prototype that is being developed at Cardiff as a front-end supporting interoperability in a multidatabase environment. Our research specifically investigates query processing in that application domain, with special emphasis on efficiency-related considerations. In this paper, only an overview of the architecture of our prototype is given. Knowledge-based and meta-programming techniques are combined with the semantic power of the object-oriented model to effectively explore the various issues of multidatabase query processing