Automatic Generation of Warehouse Mediators Using an Ontology Engine
Terence Critchlow, Madhavan Ganesh, Ron Musick
Center for Applied Scientific Computing
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
P.O. Box 808, L-561, Livermore, CA 94551
{critchlow | ganesh | rmusick}@llnl.gov
Abstract
Data warehouses created for dynamic scientific environments, such as
genetics, face significant challenges to their long-term feasibility.
One of the most significant of these is the high frequency of schema
evolution resulting from both technological advances and scientific
insight. Failure to quickly incorporate these modifications will
render the warehouse obsolete, yet each evolution requires
significant effort to ensure the changes are correctly propagated.
DataFoundry utilizes a mediated warehouse architecture with an
ontology infrastructure to reduce the maintenance requirements of a
warehouse. Among other things, the ontology is used as an information
source for automatically generating mediators, the methods that
transfer data between the data sources and the warehouse. The
identification, definition and representation of the metadata required
to perform this task is a primary contribution of this work.
Appeared in
Proceedings of the 5th KRDB Workshop, Seattle. WA. May 1998.