Experiences Using a Meta-Data Based Integration Infrastructure

A data warehouse that presents data from many of the genomics community data sources in a consistent, intuitive fashion has long been a goal of bioinformatics. Unfortunately, it is one of the goals that has not yet been achieved. One of the major problems encountered by previous attempts has been the high cost of creating and maintaining a warehouse in a dynamic environment. In this abstract we have outlined a meta-data based approach to integrating data sources that begins to address this problem. We have used this infrastructure to successfully integrate new sources into an existing warehouse in substantially less time than would have traditionally been required--and the resulting mediators are more maintainable than the traditionally defined ones would have been. In the final paper, we will describe in greater detail both our architecture and our experiences using this framework. In particular, we will outline the new, XML based representation of the meta-data, describe how the mediator generator works, and highlight other potential uses for the meta-data