A Scalable Middleware for Web Databases

Abstract

The emergence of Web databases has introduced new challenges related to their organization, access, integration, and interoperability. New approaches and techniques are needed to provide across-the-board transparency for accessing and manipulating Web databases irrespective of their data models, platforms, locations, or systems. In meeting these needs, it is necessary to build a middleware infrastructure to support flexible tools for information space organization, communication facilities, information discovery, content description, and assembly of data from heterogeneous sources. In this paper, we describe a scalable middleware for efficient data and application access that we have built using the available technologies. The resulting system is called WebFINDIT. It is a scalable and uniform infrastructure for locating and accessing heterogeneous and autonomous databases and applications.

Maintaining Mappings between Conceptual Models and Relational Schemas

“…The sources provide the real data, while the global schema is an integrated and reconciled view of the real data. Sometimes, a middleware infrastructure (Bouguettaya, Malik, Rezgui, & Korff, 2006) is needed to support data integration.…”

Modeling Service Data Objects (SDOs) to the Entity-Relationship (ER) Model

“…To support flexible business collaboration, modern distributed applications are becoming component based and the concept of a service is becoming crucial. Recent years have witnessed a paradigm shift in distributed computing from middlewareoriented architectures (Baresi et al, 2003) and legacy systems (Li et al, 2007) to Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) (Bouguettaya et al, 2006;Kim et al, 2007). SOA provides fast, effective, inexpensive business process integration (Dan et al, 2007;Zimmerman et al, 2004), asset reuse and improved business agility (Anand et al, 2005;Chen & Huang, 2006;Gold et al, 2004;Malloy et al, 2006).…”

A Survey of Approaches to Web Service Discovery in Service-Oriented Architectures

“…For example, semantic approaches depend on shared ontologies and annotated resources, whereas IR-based ones depend on textual descriptions. Scalability, fault tolerance and standard conformance are important aspects of service registries, and of databases in general (Bouguettaya et al, 2004), in which service discovery approaches present differences as well. Therefore, though service discovery systems strive to solve the same problem, they may be very different from each other and one alternative may be appropriate in a particular environment but not in others.…”