The Basis for Mediation.

Abstract

Mediator modules provide intermediary services in information systems, linking data resources and application programs. Programs that led to the concept of mediation were either constructed to support specific applications, or extended services from databases. Mediators are being built now by careful domain knowledge acquisition and hand crafting the required code. In this paper we present the conceptual underpinning for automating the mediation process. Our goal is not fully automatic code generation, since programming knowledge is necessary to provide the added value that offsets the costs of having the extra architectural layer due to formal mediation. The concept is based on the extraction of a hierarchical domain model out of the general network representing the available resources. Associated with the method are domain ontologies. Ontologies list the terms used by the models, and document their relationships. These terms provide the semantic foundation needed to perform the match...