Automatic Generation of Warehouse Mediators using an Ontology Engine

Data warehouses created for dynamic scientific environments, such as genetics, face significant challenges to their long-term feasibility. One of the most significant of these is the high frequency of schema evolution resulting from both technological advances and scientific insight. Failure to quickly incorporate these modifications will quickly render the warehouse obsolete, yet each evolution requires significant effort to ensure the changes are correctly propagated. DataFoundry utilizes a mediated warehouse architecture with an ontology infrastructure to reduce the maintenance requirements of a warehouse. Among other things, the ontology is used as an information source for automatically generating mediators, the programs that transfer data between the data sources and the warehouse. The identification, definition, and representation of the metadata required to perform this task are the primary contributions of this work.