Distributed Data Integration using Web Services and XML

Data integration has been an active topic of research in the past. With the advances in technology in the context of web, data integration faces new challenges imposed by heterogeneity of source, their autonomy and independence. Web services, which are universally accessible software components deployed on the web, are becoming the focus of recent researches due to their ability to interconnect systems and cost optimizations. At the same time, XML has also become one of the core technologies for business applications. By offering a standard, flexible and inherently extensible data format, XML significantly reduces the burden of deploying the many technologies needed to ensure the success of Web services. This thesis examines the opportunities for data integration in the context of web services development paradigm. It examines the existing technologies and standards of web services and XML and provides an example of how web services can be used to unlock heterogeneous systems to extract and integrate data. The approach followed to illustrate this uses embedded web service calls inside XML documents. The main contributions of this paper are: 1) comprehensive research of existing technologies 2) architecture to support invocation of embedded web services 3) implementation of an application to show the results 4) use of existing technologies to implement the proposed system