Implementation and applications of query interfaces to constraint databases in a distributed computing environment

Scope and method of study. Multidimensional data appear in many applications. One application is geographic information systems (GIS). Most existing GIS process alphanumeric and spatial data in separate systems. This current model has many limitations and is hard to build. Constraint database systems represent a paradigm at the intersection of databases, constraint programming, computational geometry and operations research. They can store and manipulate both alphanumeric and spatial data in an unified framework. The World Wide Web (WWW, Web or W3) is the universe of network-accessible information. Common Object Request Broker Architecture ( CORBA) is an industrial standard for distributed computing. Java is a platform independent programming language and environment. The Web infrastructure is the service or facility that is fundamental to the Web. Augmenting the Web infrastructure with CORBA/Java is called the Object Web.; Findings and conclusions. In this dissertation, implementation and applications of query interfaces to constraint databases on CORBA are presented. Built upon top of a RDBMS, these systems support queries to process both constraint data and alphanumeric data which reside distributedly. A Web-based tax calculator and a stock analysis tool are built on CORBA. A general query interface to constraint databases has been successfully implemented and tested with GIS applications, linear programming applications, and spatio-temporal applications. These problems are difficult to be solved in the traditional DBMS or GIS. This research shows that constraint database systems have the ability to handle several types of data uniformly and CORBA provides a platform for distributed computing.