KQML as an agent communication language
CIKM '94 Proceedings of the third international conference on Information and knowledge management
TAMBIS: Transparent Access to Multiple Bioinformatics Information Sources
ISMB '98 Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology
Describing and Using Query Capabilities of Heterogeneous Sources
VLDB '97 Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases
Semantic Brokering over Dynamic Heterogeneous Data Sources in InfoSleuth(tm)
ICDE '99 Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Data Engineering
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The development of networking technology has resulted in a computing environment which is highly distributed, heterogeneous and dynamic. In order for the autonomous software components in such an environment to share their information, and hence to collaborate with each other, they must be able to advertise their capabilities -- that is, to express what they have got to offer -- in a form that can be understood by other resources. In this paper, we study the problem of advertising the capabilities of an important class of resources within distributed information systems: namely, databases. We argue that current advertising mechanisms have limitations when applied to database systems, and propose an approach which overcomes these limitations. The resulting advertisement language is flexible and allows database components to advertise their capabilities in both a general and a specific way. We have demonstrated its utility by using it to advertise capabilities within a network of product databases created for Pirelli Cables Ltd.