The growing diffusion of Internet and Wide Area Networks, allows the creation of distributed Information Systems spanning entire continents. A system of these characteristics makes possible to have on-line large elements of information that can be considered as distributed objects. The software engineering process requirements due to the shared objects are not well handled by using traditional database methods. GlobData will produce COPLA, an efficient software development and support system, to provide application developers with a global view of an object database repository, with transactional access to geographically distributed objects independent of their location, allowing them to efficiently work against a single logical object environment.

The overall objective of GlobData can be structured in three different levels:

• A strategic objective, to solve the problem of efficiently access large amounts of information geographically distributed
• A technological objective, to create an innovative, transparent and portable platform for global application development requiring at the same time minimum changes in user methodologies

In particular, subobjectives of this one are:

• Implementation of an architecture and API for building applications for geographically distributed environments
• Implementation of an architecture to integrate data sources to support applications
• Implementation of the security and consistency mechanisms needed for an efficient data interchange among the geographically disperse sites
• Development of 2 testbed applications
• A business objective, to disseminate the use of COPLA through a sound exploitation plan so it can become widely available