97-11582 Rishe, Naphtali Barton, David Florida International University (FIU) CISE MII: Infrastructure for Research and Training on High-Performance Heterogeneous Distributed Database Management. This award is to be used to attract and retain minority students, encouraging high-performance database research. Planned is a special mentoring program modeled after the "Affinity Groups" of the University of Texas at El Paso. The groups, consisting of undergraduate and graduate students, post-docs, and faculty members, provide the framework that enables deepening knowledge of a field by procuring a physical setting in a cooperative research-engaging environment. Structured activities facilitate knowledge transfer and serve to ascertain progress. Summer internships for undergraduates are budgeted to involve them in research projects. The affinity groups, within the FIU High Performance Database Research Center at FIU performs research towards the development of a heterogeneous distributed database management system (HDBMS) providing fast integration of disparate data sources and efficient interoperability through the application and utilization of a semantic database management system to define a global schema of the heterogeneous data. A semantic interpretation of SQL is used for efficient interoperability of relational and object-oriented databases. Dynamically-dispatched agent technology is used to interface the distributed heterogeneous databases. Query optimization techniques in the presence of heterogeneous networks are being evaluated and investigated.
