Information Integration Environment Research Articles

MIMI: Multimodality, Multiresource, Information Integration Environment for Biomedical Core Facilities

The rapid expansion of biomedical research has brought substantial scientific and administrative data management challenges to modern core facilities. Scientifically, a core facility must be able to manage experimental workflow and the corresponding set of large and complex scientific data. It must also disseminate experimental data to relevant researchers in a secure and expedient manner that facilitates collaboration and provides support for data interpretation and analysis. Administratively, a core facility must be able to manage the scheduling of its equipment and to maintain a flexible and effective billing system to track material, resource, and personnel costs and charge for services to sustain its operation. It must also have the ability to regularly monitor the usage and performance of its equipment and to provide summary statistics on resources spent on different categories of research. To address these informatics challenges, we introduce a comprehensive system called MIMI (multimodality, multiresource, information integration environment) that integrates the administrative and scientific support of a core facility into a single web-based environment. We report the design, development, and deployment experience of a baseline MIMI system at an imaging core facility and discuss the general applicability of such a system in other types of core facilities. These initial results suggest that MIMI will be a unique, cost-effective approach to addressing the informatics infrastructure needs of core facilities and similar research laboratories.

An XML query rewriting mechanism with multiple ontologies integration based on complex semantic mapping

Semantic integration, which can be divided into three parts including ontology mapping, mapping representation, and reasoning and query rewriting with mappings, plays a key role in information integration systems. This paper develops an XML query rewriting and ontology integration mechanism, which acts as a global-as-view (GAV) approach to represent and query semantic information in mediator based information integration environment. It proposes the patterns and properties of ontology mappings, discusses the procedure and algorithm of ontology integration firstly, and then proposes the ontology based XML query mechanism, especially the XML query rewriting mechanism. Finally, a mediator-based implementation of the mechanism in OBSA system is introduced.

Spread spectrum of knowledge network based on information integration environment

Spread spectrum of knowledge network based on information integration environment

Structural templates and transformations: the Themis structural computing environment

The field of structural computing is working to produce techniques and tools to ease the task of developing application infrastructure. This paper describes the Themis structural computing environment. Themis provides developers with a generic structure server and two key extension mechanisms that enable the rapid creation of tools for a variety of application domains. The two novel extension mechanisms enable support for structure templates and automated structure transformation. Each of these mechanisms is described in detail along with the interfaces and capabilities of the generic structure server. We evaluate the utility of Themis in supporting the migration of the InfiniTe information integration environment from an XML-based repository to the Themis structure server. The use of Themis has led to a significant reduction in the number of lines of code required to produce the InfiniTe prototype. In addition, the higher level of abstraction provided by Themis has led to code that is easier to understand and maintain than the XML-based code it replaces. The paper concludes with a discussion of how structural computing tools can impact and influence software engineering and software engineering research.