40 Years of Computing at Newcastle
Department Technical Report Series No. 557
A Toolkit for Constructing Distributed Object-Oriented Metainformation Systems.
A. Calsavara and S.K. Shrivastava.
University of Newcastle upon Tyne. 1996
Abstract
Stabilis is a programming tool for the construction of distributed object-oriented metainformation systems whose main purpose is to deliver powerful and reliable object query services in large-scale distributed environments. Metainformation consists of a catalogue with an object-oriented structural description of information and corresponding indices to information objects. This permits queries to be formulated in a highly structured fashion, thus exploiting semantic knowledge about information. Information objects are external to Stabilis and can be any entity that contains information, including the resources available on the Internet. The notion of views is also supported in order to permit organising the information space according to user needs, such as topic-specific information. Transactional access is employed to obtain consistency, and replication is employed to obtain high availability and scalability. Stabilis is implemented as an extensible C++ class library atop a distributed transaction facility named Arjuna. We describe Stabilis using as an example a system for querying about bibliographical references which has been constructed as a demonstration application.
Department Technical Report Series - 1996
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Technical Report Abstract No. 557, 30 June 1997