Landscaping the information space of large multi-database networks

The promises of network-accessible information are increasingly difficult to achieve. These difficulties are due to a variety of causes, such as, the rapid growth in the volume of network-available information and the increasing complexity, diversity and terminological fluctuations of the different information sources available. This paper presents a conceptual architecture for the organization information spare across collections of component systems in a multidatabase network that provides serendipity, exploration and contextualisation support so that users can achieve logical connections between concepts they are familiar with and schema terms employed in multi-database 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.