Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf

Sharing information in loosely coupled enterprises or virtual corporations demands a flexible and dynamic architecture, suitable for their individual data policies. The aim of this paper is to present the Dígame architecture, which balances both, local autonomy and a reasonable degree of information sharing. Therefore we combine the well known concept of loosely coupled multidatabases with more recent research in Peer–to–Peer or grid computing, satisfying the needs of modern intra and inter-enterprise collaboration. In our architecture data and schema updates are propagated actively to subscribing component databases, without being managed by any central authority. This replication gives us the possibility to realize individual integration on each single peer.