Data Integration Oriented Data Service Development Tool

With the rapid development of the Internet technology and the spreading use of information systems in modern organizations, business interaction among enterprises and organizations becomes more and more common and frequent. The increasing demands of business data interoperation are recognized as a result. Business applications usually extract data from an amount of distributed, autonomous, heterogeneous data sources. It is an important problem in the research area of enterprise data integration community to provide effective and efficient data access to high level applications. .Inspired by the principles of service oriented architecture (SOA), this paper presents the design of a data service based integration platform, which is composed of a multi data source query engine, a data service management platform and the data service development tool. XML is adopted to act as the common data format within the platform, and XQuery scripts defined in data services are used to configure the general purposed query engine. The components of the platform are correlated by the concept of data service, which is a self-contained, reusable function module in the platform. Data services hide the detail information for accessing heterogeneous data sources, and provide virtual views of the underlying business data.On the basis of analyzing the structure and file format of a data service, the paper describes our design and realization of the data service development tool. The tool is composed of several modules including data source mapping, target formatting, query editing, static checking and debug. It provide data service developers with a series of supports such as metadata integrating, target format customizing, visualized data mapping, type checking, target schema generating and debugging. The tool is developed as eclipse plug-in projects. EMF is used for data service modeling and GEF for visualized model editing.A use case is given to demonstrate that the tool can facilitate the design of data services and the rapid development of data integration programs on our platform.