Sreenivasan, Sridhar.

Data are the backbone to any organization. In some organizations there are applications that operate on a distributed platform. These applications might often communicate with applications on a different platform, that structures data in a different format. The manner in which data is transferred between such applications can become complex, because there will be many platform dependent applications that need to process the data transferred. Hence a mechanism for exchange of data in a simple, effective manner for such applications is a basic necessity. In this thesis, such a mechanism to deal with data exchange in a platform independent manner is discussed. The proposed model is XML-based, and data between the applications is exchanged in the form of XML documents. XML is text-based and can be processed by any application existing on any platform. The model has an interface that processes the XML documents transferred between the client applications and the underlying database systems. The model is implemented in a System administration application. The application is a Web application that transfers data in the XML format. This is processed by the interface and transferred to the database. Data from the database is retrieved and converted to XML documents by the interface and transferred to the client (Web) applications.