Data integration through service-based mediation for web-enabled information systems

The Web and its underlying platform technologies have often been used to integrate existing software and information systems. Traditional techniques for data representation and transformations between documents are not sufficient to support a flexible and maintainable data integration solution that meets the requirements of modern complex Web-enabled software and information systems. The difficulty arises from the high degree of complexity of data structures, for example in business and technology applications, and from the constant change of data and its representation. In the Web context, where the Web platform is used to integrate different organisations or software systems, additionally the problem of heterogeneity arises. We introduce a specific data integration solution for Web applications such as Web-enabled information systems. Our contribution is an integration technology framework for Web-enabled information systems comprising, firstly, a data integration technique based on the declarative specification of transformation rules and the construction of connectors that handle the integration and, secondly, a mediator architecture based on information services and the constructed connectors to handle the integration process

The AADL Constraint Annex

The SAE Architecture Analysis and Design Language -- AADL has been defined with a strong focus on the careful modeling of critical real-time embedded systems. Around this formalism, several analysis tools have been defined, e.g. scheduling, safety, security or performance. The SAE AS2-C wishes to complement the AADL with a versatile language to support project-specific analysis. The Model Constraints Sublanguage Annex (or in short the Constraints Annex) provides a standard AADL sublanguage extension with three major objectives: •to allow specification of project specific AADL language subsets and enforce consistent use of the language subset over all classifiers in a package and all packages in a project •to allow specification of project specific Structural Assertions on AADL instance models of component implementations and specification of Structural Assertions on classifier types (component types, feature group types and their extensions) •to allow the specification of Behavior Assertions for feature groups, component types and component implementations, grouped as Assumptions and Guarantees. Assumptions group together Behavior Assertions describing expected behavior of the environment in which a component will operate. Guarantees group together Behavior Assertions which must be honored by all instances of the component, assuming that it is deployed into an environment that honors the Assumptions Behavior Assertions. In this presentation, we will provide an overview of this language, and report on ongoing implementation efforts to date for this language

Modeling views in the layered view model for XML using UML

In data engineering, view formalisms are used to provide flexibility to users and user applications by allowing them to extract and elaborate data from the stored data sources. Conversely, since the introduction of Extensible Markup Language (XML), it is fast emerging as the dominant standard for storing, describing, and interchanging data among various web and heterogeneous data sources. In combination with XML Schema, XML provides rich facilities for defining and constraining user-defined data semantics and properties, a feature that is unique to XML. In this context, it is interesting to investigate traditional database features, such as view models and view design techniques for XML. However, traditional view formalisms are strongly coupled to the data language and its syntax, thus it proves to be a difficult task to support views in the case of semi-structured data models. Therefore, in this paper we propose a Layered View Model (LVM) for XML with conceptual and schemata extensions. Here our work is three-fold; first we propose an approach to separate the implementation and conceptual aspects of the views that provides a clear separation of concerns, thus, allowing analysis and design of views to be separated from their implementation. Secondly, we define representations to express and construct these views at the conceptual level. Thirdly, we define a view transformation methodology for XML views in the LVM, which carries out automated transformation to a view schema and a view query expression in an appropriate query language. Also, to validate and apply the LVM concepts, methods and transformations developed, we propose a view-driven application development framework with the flexibility to develop web and database applications for XML, at varying levels of abstraction

A Framework for XML-based Integration of Data, Visualization and Analysis in a Biomedical Domain

Biomedical data are becoming increasingly complex and heterogeneous in nature. The data are stored in distributed information systems, using a variety of data models, and are processed by increasingly more complex tools that analyze and visualize them. We present in this paper our framework for integrating biomedical research data and tools into a unique Web front end. Our framework is applied to the University of Washington’s Human Brain Project. Specifically, we present solutions to four integration tasks: definition of complex mappings from relational sources to XML, distributed XQuery processing, generation of heterogeneous output formats, and the integration of heterogeneous data visualization and analysis tools