A graphical interface for cooperative access to distributed and heterogeneous database systems

We present the graphical interface of the system VHDBS, which has been jointly developed by an industrial research project at the Technology Center of the German Telekom and at the Fraunhofer ISST. The VHDBS system enables the integration and interoperation of existing distributed and heterogeneous databases, which were developed independently. The graphical interface FGRAPH of VHDBS provides uniform access to distributed and heterogeneous data. The interface is based on a sophisticated design, which enables browsing on both schema and object level, and allows both query and browsing of objects. In particular the user can move back and forth freely between query and browsing activities. Cooperative access to the data in various underlying databases is supported and platform, location and data model transparency is provided to the user