by Jaroslav Pokorny
A workshop on Heterogeneous Information Management (HIM), organised by the ERCIM Database Research Group, took place in Prague 4-5 November 1996. 19 persons from 7 countries participated in this event.
Heterogeneous information management represents not only a hot database paradigm, but an important software engineering discipline used mainly in recent enterprise Information Technology applications and in Internet technolgy as well. Integrating research results from the area of database modelling of classical and multimedial data, data semantics, distributed computing etc. can help to better understand how to manage information spread in different databases or in different information resources. Thousands of designers of business information systems must overcome many problems concerning design and performance of legacy databases. Common problems of these field are due to missing appropriate methodologies, sound and rich mechanisms for expressing database semantics, and last but not least technical tools supporting database integration.
The aim of the workshop was to establish new contacts between interested in above themes and to discuss given problems in presentations of selected contributions. The number of papers was limited to 10. The papers could be divided into three categories. The first one contained 3 contributions concerning multimedial data, eg medical documents. Problems such as retrieving data and schema integration were discussed here. In the second category we can include contributions approaching classical HIM problems, eg federate schemes building, query translation for HIM, multiple view definition, and support of integrity in federated databases. Finally, last category offered CORBA-oriented approach to heterogeneity, and interesting discussion of practical problems with sharing information about people in an organisation.
The proceedings of the workshop are available electronically at the ERCIM web site.
A meeting of ERCIM workshop participants was held on 5 November. A series activities was discussed, such as themes of future workshops and possibilities of common projects.
Please contact:
Jaroslav Pokorny - CRCIM
Tel: +42 2 21914265
E-mail: pokorny@ksi.ms.mff.cuni.cz