MiroWEB

Enterprises are finding that they need to make better use of their information resources in order to operate effectively in contemporary business. Therefore, existing islands of information need to be integrated within a flexible and coherent technical framework. An approach towards this end are Intranet/Internet platforms that support access to existing files, databases, data warehouses and applications from a single MiroWEB is an Esprit Project (EP 25208) that aims at the development of middleware components providing integrated access to multiple data origins from web browsers using Internet/Intranet protocols. MiroWEB builds the approach for database interoperability developed in the ESPRIT Project IRO-DB (EP 8629). Using this approach, interoperability is accomplished by means of 3 layers: database adapters (provide uniform access to individual DB), communication layer (supports remote data access), interoperable layer (allows integrated views on several DB). Adopting this approach to Internet platforms poses two fundamental challenges: (1) The majority of the information sources are not fully fledged DB with an explicit schema, but semi-structured data of proprietary format. (2) Especially Internet sources evolve at a much higher pace than DB in a controlled business setting. MiroWEB puts particular focus on tackling the large variety of sources and their dynamics. Two applications will be prototyped to improve the design and the commercial assessment of the technology: (1) A tourist information and reservation virtual server which accesses several tourist web servers and reservation systems. (2) A pilot system that allows both health professionals of Primary Care and Outpatient Clinics to consult hospital health information from a variety of systems.