Tools for Data Translation and Integration

A broad spectrum of data is available on the Web in distinct heterogeneous sources, stored under different formats. As the number of systems that utilize this data grows, the importance of data conversion mechanisms increases greatly. We present here an overview of a French-Israeli research project aimed at developing tools to simplify the intricate task of data translation. The solution is based on a middleware data model to which various data sources are mapped, and a declarative language for specifying translations within the middleware model. A complementary schema-based mechanism is used to automate some of the translation. Some particular aspects of the solution are detailed in [3, 7, 10].