Research On The Intelligent Self-Describing Data Dictionary Of Distributed Information Fusion System

As the wide-rang application of kinds of sensors, those technologies on information fusion have gained more attentions. How to set up an information fusion system based on the multi-sensors has rapidly become o-ne of the hot subjects for domestic and foreign researchers. In a typical Distributed Information Fusion System ( DIFS ) which fully presents the feature of parallel calculation, the sensors are usually located on different observation sites. This then requires DIFS to deal with two types of data, one is those real time data measured by various sensors at their locations, the other type, which is used to describe the former ones, is called metadata. At present, although the research about how to manage and use the metadatas in different application fields could offer some help to do the s-ame thing in DIFS, now an more critical problem for DIFS is how to 'tie up' the two types of data and transfer them.After carrying out a full study on the problem, the article offers a m-ethod to combine the actual datas measured by the sensors and the describing metadatas as the form of self-describing data,that is a data flow with the describing metadata ahead and the actual data behind. According to the domestic and foreign researchers on the subject, most self-describing data transfer methods are far from perfect due to some defects, such as la-cking in generality, limited to data transfer of a specific type, too general or too complicated to be realized. In order to solve the problem in a better way, the paper provides a new information transfer method that is based on intelligent self-describing data dictionary , and so is named as intelligent self-describing data dictionary method. By serializing the describing metadatas in the form of data dictionary, transferring them with the actual measure datas at the same time, the method aims at setting up a universal mechanism which is independent of platforms, sensors, and protocols for the self-describing data transfer in DIFS.The article introduces the designing of the intelligent self-describing data dictionary method in detail, sets up the frame of the method according to the component technology in software reuse. The author also describes each parts of the new frame, as well as to prove the feasibility of t-he intelligent self-describing data dictionary method. Then the paper focuses on the core of the method — data dictionary, provides the data model of the data dictionary, describes the realization of data dictionary in the standard component .Finally, a case is used to describe the realization of data dictionary in the specific component.