MAKBIS: coordinated access to heterogeneous and autonomous information system

Presents an overview of MAKBIS (Multi-Agent Knowledge-Brokered Information Services), an environment to support coordinated access to information stored in networks of loosely-coupled heterogeneous and autonomous information and database management systems. Database management systems in the environment are interoperable and can be dynamically federated providing integrated and user-personalised object views. MAKBIS provides an object-based networked distributed architecture with broker objects that support interconnection and interoperation among database interface objects and user interface objects through group communication mechanisms. It also provides an objected-oriented common data model and query language with an expressive set of operations to explore export schemas of different databases in the environment, to query individual or multiple databases as well as to interactively construct and query personalised integrated views of several export schemas in the environment