The Institute of Computer Science of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul is participating in a project to develop a computer system infrastructure for supporting the Brazilian health ministry’s SUS (Sistema Unificado de Saude) program. In order to construct this heterogeneous system, we have to start from existing information sources (possibly "legacy") and their services and gradually integrate them with new software and hardware architectures, guided by requirements evolution and technical innovations. This requires to combine distributed query processing with a service-based middleware framework as defined, e.g., by CORBA. This paper describes the conceptual and implementational aspects of the SUS-specific solution to this challenge.
Heterogeneity; Database Federation; Health Information System; Schema Integration; Middleware; Service Distribution
