An Integration Framework for CORBA Objects

Abstract

The evolving developments of the recent decades in information management have resulted in a situation where information is stored and managed by a large variety of systems around the globe. The growing requirement for information support to the globalised social and economic forces makes efficient and effective availability of distributed information and the correlation of relevant data a pressing business need. The most recent CORBA standard of the Object Management Group provides standardised interfaces for accessing remote data but the task of collecting and correlating the relevant, heterogeneous sources is still left over to the human user. The presented work proposes a CORBA-based Data Integration Framework with which data is integrated and offered to users according to their application needs. This framework is composed of two CORBA horizontal facilities, the design-time Object Composition Facility, which supports the data integration process, and the run-time Composed Access Facility which, based on the previously defined data integration, performs all required distributed accesses transparently to the users.