Research Trends

The last decades have witnessed a growing need for data sharing. Accessing and manipulating data independently from the way it is organized and accessed within one site is the major hurdle that needs to be overcome. The multidatabase topic has been an active research area for several years, resulting in well-accepted results. Several prototypes have been developed. Some products have been also extended to provide multidatabase functions. Recently, work in this area has taken advantage of the standardization efforts in distributed object computing. As pointed out in the previous chapter, standards bridge heterogeneity at the platform, network, and implementation language levels. Improvements in hardware and networking, combined with the explosive use of the Web, increased dramatically the use of databases in many challenging applications. One of the most challenging problems that faces the database research community in the next decade or so is achieving an interoperable worldwide environment for the ever-increasing number of autonomous and heterogeneous databases (Scheuermann et al., 1990). The volume of data is becoming larger, data formats are more diverse, and the information space is highly dynamic and distributed over the world. In this chapter, we discuss various related database trends, namely information sharing on the Web, workflow management systems, and data warehousing.