Virtualization of Heterogeneous Data Sources for Grid Information Systems

Abstract

Grid Information Systems will use existing data from various distributed and heterogeneous data stores as well as new data entering the organization. Several technical obstacles arise in the design and implementation of a system for integration of such data sources -- most notably distribution, autonomy, and data heterogeneity. This paper describes the data integration system based on the wrappermediator approach -- namely the Grid Data Mediation Service -- of the GridMiner project conducted in Vienna. The developed mediation service is, to our best knowledge, the first prototype of a Grid service capable of presenting distributed, heterogeneous data sources as one logical virtual data source on the Grid. We developed a flexible mapping schema to describe the building process of a virtual data source. At present, integratable data sources include structured as well as semi-structured data sources. Although we are (currently) not describing the semantics of the data sources, our system permits the possibility to include own Java transformation functions (static and dynamic) in the mediation process to resolve all kinds of heterogeneities