Using a distributed approach to retrieve and integrate information from heterogeneous distributed databases

With the current explosion of information accessible through the Internet, there is increasing interest in the problem of retrieval and integration of information from heterogeneous data sources. Much work has been done in this area, although aspects of the problem remain. This paper describes a general approach, which uses an agent-based architecture to retrieve information from a set of heterogeneous distributed databases and consolidate it, taking account of the syntactic and semantic differences between data sources. The system has been implemented in Java and makes use of CORBA, XML and JDBC.