Abstract: Global information systems involve a large number of information sources distributed over computer networks. The variety of information sources and disparity of interfaces makes the task of easily locating and efficiently accessing information over the network very cumbersome. We describe an architecture for global information systems that is especially tailored to address the challenges raised in such an environment, and distinguish our architecture from architectures of multidatabase and distributed database systems. Our architecture is based on presenting a conceptually unified view of the information space to a user, specifying rich descriptions of the contents of the information sources, and using these descriptions for optimizing queries posed in the unified view.

The contributions of this paper include: (1) we identify aspects of site descriptions that are useful in query optimization; (2) we describe novel query optimization techniques that minimize the number of information sources accessed; (3) we demonstrate the need for dynamic query plans in such a system, and present an algorithm for this purpose; and (4) we describe a prototype global information system, Information Manifold, that incorporates the techniques presented.