Integrating diverse information repositories: a distributed hypertext approach

Abstract

The authors address key problems of support for multiple, heterogeneous repositories, each under separate and autonomous administration with a variety of incompatible interfaces; diverse, unconventional data types; and different ways of viewing relations among the same information items. They present a solution to these problems that is radically different from existing systems. It is based on their distributed hypertext (DHT) architecture, which combines transparent access to autonomous, heterogeneous information repositories and a powerful, flexible organization technique. This approach requires no change to the structure or content of participating repositories.