A Simple Framework for Contracts in Federated Database Systems

William M. Farmer, Mark E. Nadel

1995

Abstract

A federated database system is a collection of organizations, called a
federation, and a collection of databases belonging to the
organizations.  Members of the federation can enter into contracts
that specify how data is shared between the databases of the system.
An important issue is how the contracts interact with one another.
This paper presents a simple framework for writing contracts in
federated database systems that limits contract interaction, and
thereby, makes it possible to detect contention between contracts.