With the proliferation of the World Wide Web, it has become very important to provide advanced tools for maintaining referential integrity of information resources. The growing tendency toward building increasingly complex Web sites makes it necessary to maintain not only physical files, but also logical resources, or views, which are composed of references to other resources and presentation programs. Our solution to this problem is to design an infrastructure of resource maintenance agents. It includes the Data Agent, which keeps track of files and supports third-party requests to notify them of changes that occur to these files. Another component of the infrastructure is the Repository Agent, which supports change notification requests for logical resources. Prototype implementation of the infrastructure is currently available and is discussed in this paper.
Sofus A. Macskassy, Leon A. Shklar