Q. how do you know the owner of a database

Do you mean the company that owns the database? For example, Academic Search Complete is owned by EBSCO. To determine the owning company, you look for the logo across the top, or the "About Us", Contact, or copyright information, like you would on a website.

I'm linking to our database guide below, which shows which databases COM Library subscribes to. You can use the database provider pull down menu to select a vendor and see which databases belong to it.

Hope that helps!