Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf

Collaborative work requires, more than ever, access to data located on multiple autonomous and heterogeneous data sources. The development of these novel information platforms, referred to as information or data grids, and the evolving databases based on P2P concepts, need appropriate modeling and description mechanisms. In this paper we propose the Link Pattern Catalog as a modeling guideline for recurring problems appearing during the design or description of information grids and P2P networks. For this purpose we introduce the Data Link Modeling Language, a language for describing and modeling virtually any kind of data flows in information sharing environments.