A Workbench for Prototyping XML Data Exchange

This paper describes a prototype software which is the outcome of a research carried at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice in the framework of the project Data-X . The software is a workbench for "data engineers", integrating several tools which assist the user in all the tasks of integration and exchange of data with a standard format, for instance for application integration, generation of content-rich web portals, building of virtual information systems, etc. The system described here is a first step towards the construction of a "data hub": with this term, we intend a comprehensive tool which, like a network hub device, connects several information sources and consumers through standard ports, allowing the designer to dynamically interconnect these ports in different ways, and performing appropriate translations. Such a tool would be of great help for the tasks above mentioned, and its existence is made possible by the nowadays wide acceptance of XM