Joseph Fong and Kenneth Wong, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Conventional databases are associated with a plurality of database models. Generally database models are distinct and not interoperable. Data stored in a database under a particular database model can be termed as “siloed data”. Accordingly, a DBMS associated with a database silo, is generally not interoperable with another database management system associated with another database sil. This can limit the exchange of information stored in a database where those desiring to access the information are not employing a database management system associated with the database model related to the information. The DBMS of various data models have proliferated into many companies, and become their legacy databases. There is a need to access these legacy databases using ODBC. An ODBC is for the users to transform a legacy database into another legacy database. This paper offers an end user’s tool of Open Universal Database Gateway(OUDG) to supplement ODBC by transforming a source legacy database data into Flattened XML documents, and further transform Flattened XML document into a target legacy database. The Flattened XML document is a mixture of relational and XML data models, which is user friendly and is a data standard on the Internet. The result of reengineering legacy databases into each other through OUDG is information lossless by the preservation of their data semantics in terms of data dependencies.

Open universal database gateway, Legacy databases, Flattened XML Documents, Data semantics, Data dependencies, Open database connectivity