Chris Wolf

OpenII: an open source information integration toolkit

OpenII (openintegration.org) is a collaborative effort to create a suite of open-source tools for information integration (II). The project is leveraging the latest developments in II research to create a platform on which integration tools can be built and further research conducted. In addition to a scalable, extensible platform, OpenII includes industrial-strength components developed by MITRE, Google, UC-Irvine, and UC-Berkeley that interoperate through a common repository in order to solve II problems. Components of the toolkit have been successfully applied to several large-scale US government II challenges.

The Harmony Integration Workbench

A key aspect of any data integration endeavor is determining the relationships between the source schemata and the target schema. This schema integration task must be tackled regardless of the integration architecture or mapping formalism. In this paper, we provide a task model for schema integration. We use this breakdown to motivate a workbench for schema integration in which multiple tools share a common knowledge repository. In particular, the workbench facilitates the interoperation of research prototypes for schema matching (which automatically identify likely semantic correspondences) with commercial schema mapping tools (which help produce instance-level transformations). Currently, each of these tools provides its own ad hoc representation of schemata and mappings; combining these tools requires aligning these representations. The workbench provides a common representation so that these tools can more rapidly be combined.

Exploring schema similarity at multiple resolutions

Large, dynamic, and ad-hoc organizations must frequently initiate data integration and sharing efforts with insufficient awareness of how organizational data sources are related. Decision makers need to reason about data model interactions much as they do about data instance interactions in OLAP: at multiple levels of granularity. We demonstrate an integrated environment for exploring schema similarity across multiple resolutions. Users visualize and interact with clusters of related schemas using a tool named Affinity. Within any cluster, users may drill-down to examine the extent and content of schema overlap. Further drill down enables users to explore fine-grained element-level correspondences between between two selected schemas.

Unity: Speeding the creation of community vocabularies for information integration and reuse

Many data sharing communities create data standards (“hub” schemata) to speed information integration by increasing reuse of both data definitions and mappings. Unfortunately, creation of these standards and the mappings to the enterprises implemented systems is both time consuming and expensive. This paper presents Unity, a novel tool for speeding the development of a community vocabulary, which includes both a standard schema and the necessary mappings. We present Unitys scalable algorithms for creating vocabularies and its novel human computer interface which gives the integrator a powerful environment for refining the vocabulary. We then describe Unitys extensive reuse of data structures and algorithms from the OpenII information integration framework, which not only sped the construction of Unity but also results in reuse of the artifacts produced by Unity: vocabularies serve as the basis of information exchanges, and also can be reused as thesauri by other tools within the OpenII framework. Unity has been applied to real U.S. government information integration challenges.

Intuitive Interaction with Encrypted Query Execution in DataStorm

The encrypted execution of database queries promises powerful security protections, however users are currently unlikely to benefit without significant expertise. In this demonstration, we illustrate a simple workflow enabling users to design secure executions of their queries. The Data Storm system demonstrated simplifies both the design and execution of encrypted execution plans, and represents progress toward the challenge of developing a general planner for encrypted query execution.