A JDBC Data Mediation Service

A serious problem facing many organizations today is the need to use information from multiple data sources that have been developed separately. Conflicts in the structure and semantics of these disparate data sources create major obstacles to effective use. We have previously described our data mediation approach to this problem in which the structure and semantics of each database is defined by mapping data elements onto a common ontology expressed as a conceptual schema. Here we report our implementation of an RMIbased mediation service with JDBC drivers. An application can switch to any data source registered with the mediator simply by plugging in our drivers and supplying a url that points to the mediation service. No other code needs to be rewritten.