The Architecture for Semantic Data Access to Heterogeneous Information Sources

1 This paper presents the analysis and high-level design of a system that will allow uniform access to heterogeneous data sources such as semantic databases, relational databases, web sites, ASCII files, and others via a common query interface. This interface is based on the Semantic Database Model, which is superior to other data models in expressive power and ease of use, and which allows us to represent a unified semantic schema of all the combined sources --- the United Semantic Schema. Interoperability with commonly used tools is supported via ODBC. A particular application of the system to provide an ODBC interface to the WWW as a data source is discussed. Keywords: heterogeneous databases, semantic databases, interoperability, WWW, data models, query execution. 1. Introduction Hundreds of different Database Management Systems are used to store data today. Most of them have different data formats that are not interchangeable. In order for applications to interact with differe..