Active XML-based Web Data Integration

Abstract Today, the Web is the largest source of information worldwide. There is currently an increasing demand that decision-making applications such as Data Warehousing (DW) and Business Intelligence (BI) move onto the Web, especially in the cloud. Integrating data into the DW/BI applications is a critical and time-consuming task. To make better decisions in DW/BI applications, next generation data integration poses new requirements to data integration systems, over those posed by traditional data integration. We propose in this paper a metadata-based, event-driven, and service-oriented framework for integrating real-time data autonomously. Our framework utilizes Web standards to integrate data from heterogeneous and distributed sources. It exploits the XML language to address data heterogeneity, Web services to tackle data distribution, and Active XML (AXML) to store integrated data. Our framework is also subscribed to web services for real-time change data capture. Moreover, beside logging different framework events into a specified repository for on-line analysis and reporting, we propose a novel Frequency XML-based Tree (FXT) structure for mining association rules from logged event streams using XQuery. Our framework is also incorporates active rules to automate and activate different integration services. Finally, we present a web application prototype as a proof of concept