A unifying semantic model for accessing multiple heterogeneous databases in a manufacturing environment

Proliferation in database applications has resulted in the use of diverse types of database management systems (DBMS) even within a single organization. As usage has grown, the desire to link and integrate separate databases has resulted in substantial effort being directed towards the design of distributed database systems (DDS). One of the major challenges of integrating diverse databases is to hide the heterogeneity of the constituent databases from users. This paper describes the ongoing research in integrating databases at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the Automated Manufacturing Research Facility