Throughout government and industry, extremely large volumes of data are being stored with complex requirements in very heterogeneous hardware, software, and communications environments. Infograte, Incorporated has developed a robust software solution that allows users to transparently extract data stored across disparate and geographically dispersed heterogeneous databases from a single user-friendly interface. The software solution consists of a proprietary knowledge representation, development technique, and query processor. Infograte's representation employs a three-tiered extension of entity-category-relationship theory as the foundation for a global schema that models the logic of a virtual database federation. The development technique is an iterative methodology that is used to build the required global schema. The query processing algorithm follows a mediation approach to interpret the global schema and semantically translate queries across the distributed database federation. InfoGrate will apply its knowledge representation and development technique to the Navy's ship engineering data environment. The result will be a global schema that can be used with InfoGrate's query processor to virtually integrate the data. The technique will be applied by the Infograte research team, which has a successful track record of developing and commercializing database technologies.
