The MIRO-Web
by Peter Fankhauser
Enterprises are finding that they need to make better use of their
information resources in order to operate effectively in contemporary
business or public environments. Therefore, existing islands of
information need to be integrated within a flexible and coherent
technical framework. One prominent approach towards this end are
Intranet and Internet platforms that support access to existing
files, databases, data warehouses, and legacy applications from
a single browser interface. However, the existing tools do not
allow for the integration of multiple data sources beyond simple
links between them. MIRO-Web is an Esprit Project (EP 25208) that
aims at the development of middleware components providing integrated
access to multiple data sources from standard Web browsers (eg
Netscape or Microsoft Explorer) using Internet/Intranet protocols.
MIRO-Web builds the approach for database interoperability developed
in the ESPRIT Project IRO-DB (EP 8629). With this approach, interoperability
is accomplished by means of three layers: Database adapters provide
for a uniform access to individual databases, a communication
layer supports remote data access, and an interoperable layer
allows for integrated views on several databases. Adopting this
approach to Internet and Intranet platforms poses two fundamental
challenges.
The majority of the information sources are not fully fledged
databases with an explicit schema, but semi-structured data of
often proprietary format. Especially Internet sources evolve at
a much higher pace than databases in a controlled business setting.
MIRO-Web puts particular focus on tackling the large variety of
sources and their dynamics. Towards this end, the following three
components will be developed:
- a data source adapter construction toolkit, providing the means
to build adapters for accessing a wide variety of local data sources,
including structured or weakly structured files (eg, Cobol or
HTML), relational or object-relational databases, and legacy hierarchical
databases
- a metadata integrator workbench to extract and integrate various
schemas of data sources in terms of object-relational types and
tables, and to populate a metadata repository containing data
sources and integrated view definitions.
- a mediator to process object-relational queries (ie SQL3), decompose
them into sub-queries addressed to data source adapters, and return
integrated and structured results as object-relational collections
capable of being displayed by a Web browser or manipulated by
an application. In parallel a datawarehouse solution based on
an object-relational DBMS will be developed, which caches portions
of the individual datasources for better performance.
Together these components form a middleware layer that allows
for uniform access to widely differing data sources, and also
merging multiple data sources into a single integrated view.
Applications
Two typical Internet and Intranet applications will be prototyped
to better design and commercially assess the technology during
the project. The first application for Tyrol Information Systems
(TIS GmbH) realizes a touristic information and reservation virtual
server which accesses several tourism webservers and reservation
systems. The second application for the Basque Health Service
(BHS) aims at a pilot system that allows both health professionals
of Primary Care and Outpatient Clinics to consult hospital health
information from a variety of systems in an integrated fashion.
The project has started in November 1997. It is carried out in
collaboration with Ibermática (Spain), Bull (France), OSIS (France),
the Basque Health Service (Spain), TIS (Austria), and INRIA (France).
Information on the web at : http://www.darmstadt.gmd.de/oasys/projects/miro/mirowe.html
Please contact:
Peter Fankhauser - GMD
Tel: +49 6151 869 940
E-mail: fankhaus@darmstadt.gmd.de
