Information Brokering over the Information Highway: An Internet-Based Database Navigation System

The profuse use of the information highway has promoted it as a meritorious medium for global information sharing; accessing and sharing information stored in different databases that are inter-linked by the internet. We present an internet-based database application, a ‘Re-configurable Internet Information Broker’ that provides (a) the functionality to dynamically connect and interact in real-time with remote databases via the internet; and (b) an ‘intelligent’ database navigation engine based on the notion of database virtual hierarchies -a database navigation mechanism that allows users to navigate the database by envisaging it as a user-defined hierarchical structure.