Abstract
Genomic and protein sequences, and in general molecular biology data, belongs to a relatively new information medium, with its own specific processing algorithms. Integrating such data from heterogeneous sources presents many of the challenges presented by integrating more common multimedia database integration. In this talk we are discussing solutions built as distributed applications because of the need for information sharing and that are easily scalable and reconfigurable in order to accommodate the frequent changes requested by molecular biology researchers. Specifically, we consider Mobile Information Managers (MIMs) which combine a specific approach to generating mediators with some aspects of agent technology, with everything based on a strongly uniform formal foundation.
MIMs are downloadable, networked components that have to a large degree uniform capabilities and can run at any site that implements the execution engine (virtual machine) for them. The basic functionality of a MIM is to implement a data integration and transformation from one or more data sources to one (virtual) data target. This target is therefore an (unmaterialized) view of the sources, and it is offered as yet another data source to the rest of the application. Thus, MIMs communicate with queries flowing in one direction and data returning in the other A MIM will contain a high-level description of the schemas for sources and target and of the integration/transformation that governs its activity. These descriptions, as well as the description of the queries and the data are formalized in the same internal framework.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Tannen, V. (1998). Heterogeneous Data Integration with Mobile Information Managers. In: Advances in Multimedia Information Systems. MIS 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1508. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-49651-3_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-49651-3_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-65107-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-49651-9
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive