Pegasus, a heterogeneous multidatabase management system that responds to the need for effective access and management of shared data across in a wide range of applications, is described. Pegasus provides facilities for multidatabase applications to access and manipulate multipole autonomous heterogeneous distributed object-oriented relational, and other information systems through a uniform interface. It is a complete data management system that integrates various native and local databases. Pegasus takes advantage of object-oriented data modeling and programming capabilities. It uses both type and function abstractions to deal with mapping and integration problems. Function implementation can be defined in an underlying database language or a programming language. Data abstraction and encapsulation facilities in the Pegasus object model provide an extensible framework for dealing with various kinds of heterogeneities in the traditional database systems and nontraditional data sources. >