Integration of diverse hypermedia link servers using request routing

Hypermedia link servers are a powerful infrastructure component for creation and delivery of network based information applications. The Distributed Link Service is an established design for a link service on the Internet using the WWW infrastructure and has been exercised in a number of projects. We investigate the provision of such a link service operating over multiple and disparate link servers. We report on an initial experiment which utilised query routing in a laboratory environment with a variety of link servers; the experiment provides proof of concept and suggests particular benefits in the query routing approach to managing the search space. We then discuss the use of table replication and migration to promote scalability, presenting preliminary results from simulations