TOWARDS CONCEPTUAL MEDIATION* A semantic architecture for dynamic integration of heterogeneous databases

摘要

Mediators are usually developed as monolithic systems which envelope the data source's semantics as well as its location. Furthermore, its architecture based on wrappers involves a high coupling degree among the mediator's components. This coupling does not allow sharing services with other organizations or the dynamic integration of new data sources. Therefore, wrappers must be re-designed and manually added for each mediation system. We propose an architecture for conceptual mediation in which the sources' query capabilities are published as web services. These services can be registered in one or more resource directories (Semantic Directories), which are the core of this architecture because they provide the needed flexibility and scalability for dynamic integration. Finally, we show an application in a bioinformatics context to validate our approach.