Federating Databases and Files: An Approach to a Uniform and Comfortable Interface to Heterogeneous Tourist Information Systems

In this paper we sketch an approach to the integration of heterogeneous tourist information systems into database federations. Since many tourist information systems offer WWW-interfaces based on HTML-files and furthermore, many local information systems are based on specific file formats, we have to consider such file associations. For the integration of these file associations, the main problem is the lack of meta-information. Therefore, we have to derive an appropriate local conceptual schema. The derived conceptual schemata and the schemata of other tourist database systems will be integrated into a federated schema. Moreover, we briefly discuss the benefits of a federated tourist information system.