Exploitation of database meta-data in assisting database interoperation

Some of the major problems to be solved in achieving semantic interoperability are: determining which databases store relevant data for a given user requirement or application (resource discovery), identifying and resolving schematic conflicts between semantically related data objects in different databases (information correlation), and deriving integrated views over multiple databases to access their data collectively (information integration). In our research the main focus is on the creation of an environment of software tools to assist users in these tasks. The scope of our research is the loosely-coupled federation, where views are created and used to define a user´s requirements to access and link together data from multiple databases