Integrating distributed scientific data sources with MOCHA and XRoaster

MOCHA is a novel middleware system for integrating distributed data sources that we have developed at the University of Maryland. MOCHA is based on the idea that the code that implements user-defined types and functions should be automatically deployed to remote sites by the middleware system itself. To this end, we have developed an XML-based framework to specify metadata about data sites, data sets, and user-defined types and functions. XRoaster is a graphical tool that we have developed to help the user create all the XML metadata elements to be used in MOCHA.