Mediators, Concepts and Practice To appear in Studies Information Reuse and Integration In Academia And Industry Springer Verlag, Wien, 2012 Editors: Tansel Özyer, Keivan Kianmehr, Mehmet Tan, Jia Zeng Gio Wiederhold Prof. Emeritus, CS, EE, & Medicine, Stanford University
[email protected] 0 Abstract Mediators are intermediary modules in large-scale information systems that link multiple sources of information to applications. They provide a means for integrating the application of encoded knowledge into information systems. Mediated systems compose autonomous data and information services, permitting growth and enable their survival in a semantically diverse and rapidly changing world. Constraints of scope are placed on mediators to assure effective and maintainable composed systems. Modularity in mediated architectures is not only a goal, but also enables the goal to be reached. Mediators focus on semantic matching, while middleware provides the essential syntactic and formatting interfaces. 1 Overview We first present the role of mediators and the architecture of mediated systems, as well as some definition for terms used throughout this exposition. Section 3 deals with mediators at a conceptual level. Section 4 presents the basic functionalities, and Section 5 presents the primary objective of mediators, information integration, including the problems of heterogeneous semantics, and the modeling of knowledge to drive integration. Section 6 points to related topics, not covered as such in earlier chapters. A final summary reviews the state of the technology, indicating where research is needed so that the concepts will support composed information systems of ever greater scale. 1.1 Architecture Mediators interpose integration and abstraction services in large-scale information systems to support applications used by decision-makers, where the scale, diversity, and complexity, of relevant data and information resources are such that the applications would be overwhelmed.