Hierarchical framework for distributed information sharing platform

For a long time, sharing information across different systems has been one of the important issues in distributed computing and network environment. The technology aims to achieve the interoperability of large transaction processing systems, eliminate “Information Island” and share resources across different information systems. This paper presents core technologies used to build a distributed information sharing platform (DISP), with emphases on reliable and transparent data transfer, complex transaction processing and data replication across homogenous or heterogeneous database management systems (DBMS). DISP adopts ODBC standard as the client-side API(s), and any ODBC compliant client can extract data from the target server using DISP without extra coding. By adopting AntNet routing algorithm and LDAP publication technology, the metadata in DISP can be navigated and synchronized dynamically, which helps to locate target information across distributed systems. DISP has been used to connect several management information systems (MIS) in Chinese Ministry of Railways recently. The implemented results indicate that DISP promotes these systems to cooperate with each other better, thus improving the performance of executive operations significantly.