Meta-Chronicle: a spatial and temporal multidatabase system and its application to histories

By creating an interconnection mechanism among a lot of legacy databases, the values of those databases gain significantly. Semantic interoperability among heterogeneous legacy databases has been a critical issue for a decade, because the values gain more if richer semantics are involved for the interconnection. We present a multidatabase system Meta-Chronicle which interconnects heterogeneous databases by dynamically computing spatial and temporal semantics in a meta-level of local databases. The feature of Meta-Chronicle is to realize data integration among heterogeneous databases by computing spatial and temporal interrelationships context-dependently. An application to histories of distinct domains is also shown to evaluate feasibility of Meta-Chronicle.