WebFindIt: an architecture and system for querying Web databases

The Web offers a single user interface to data sharing across heterogeneous and autonomous databases, but it was not designed to handle the rigid DBMS protocols and data formats used by relational and object-oriented databases. WebFindIt is an ongoing project to develop the database equivalent of the World Wide Web-namely, a World Wide Database-through a middleware infrastructure for describing, locating, and accessing data from any kind of Web-accessible database. A special-purpose language, Web-Tassili, supports the definition and manipulation of middleware constructs for organizing the information space. An implementation of WebFindIt combines Java, CORBA and database technologies.