Landscaping the information space of large multi-database networks

The promises of network-accessible information are increasingly difficult to achieve. These difficulties are due to a variety of causes, such as, the rapid growth in the volume of network-available information and the increasing complexity, diversity and terminological fluctuations of the different information sources available. This paper presents a conceptual architecture for the organisation information space across collections of component systems in multi-databases that provides serendipity, exploration and contextualisation support so that users can achieve logical connections between concepts they are familiar with and schema terms employed in multi-database systems. Large-scale searching for multi-database schema information is guided by a combination of lexical, structural and semantic aspects of schema terms in order to reveal more meaning both about the contents of a requested information term and about its placement within the distributed information space.