Organizing a network of databases using probabilistic reasoning

Due to the complexi ty of real-world applications, the number of da tabases and the volumes of da ta in databases have increased tremendously. With the explosive growth in the amount and complexity of data, how to effectively organize the databases and utilize the huge amount of da ta becomes important . For this purpose, a probabilistic network tha t organizes a network of databases and manages the da ta in the databases is proposed in this paper. Each database is represented as a node in the probabilistic network and the affinity relations of the databases are embedded in the proposed Markov model mediator (MMM) mechanism. Probabil ist ic reasoning technique is used to formulate and derive the probabil i ty distributions for an MMM. Once the probabil i ty distributions of each MMM are generated, a stochastic process is conducted to calculate the similarity measures for pairs of databases. The similarity measures are t ransformed into the branch probabilit ies of the probabilistic network. Then, the da ta in the database can be managed and utilized to allow user queries for database searching and information retrieval. An example is included to il lustrate how to model each database into an MMM and how to organize the network of databases into a probabilistic network.