An object-oriented view onto public, heterogeneous text databases

Even though companies maintain highly-structured traditional business data in relational databases, large amounts of information are available in semi-structured text sources such as indexed online newspapers, patent information, literature citations, or business profiles. This information is offered by commercial providers who maintain complete control over access language, schemas and update capabilities. One way to unify access to all of this material is to make it look like a collection of objects in an object-oriented database. Such a view has been prototyped on an information service that provides some 400 full-text, bibliographic and numeric databases. The authors explain how the illusion of object-orientedness is put together and how it is maintained in queries. They also know how the object-oriented approach is used to handle some classes of schema heterogeneity