Web Services Based Integration Tool for Heterogeneous Databases

Abstract

In this paper we introduce an integration system that consists of two subsystems (tools): integration sub-system (tool) and query (sub-system) tool. The integration tool has been built for integrating data from different data stores (databases) that were created with different database engines. The query sub-system (tool) has been built to help a user to query in a structured natural language or structured query language. The integration system has been built based on the web services technology to be adaptable, reusable, maintainable, and distributed. The integration subsystem collects data from heterogeneous data sources, unifies them based on ontology and stores the unified data in a data warehousing, which its schema is generated automatically by the tool. The integration tool is a database engine independent, domain independent and based on ontology scheme. The query tool has been built to accept the requests from a user and manipulate data in the data warehouse and return the results to the user. The query tool generates queries automatically based on the user requirements and data warehouse schema. The user can write his query as structured natural language or structured query language. The system has been implemented and tested.