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DIOM - Distributed Interoperable Object Model

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Project Description

The goal of the DIOM project is to develop an adaptive methodology and toolkits for intelligent integration and access of heterogeneous information sources in large-scale and rapidly growing enterprise-wide networking environments (such as the Internet). The information sources can either be structured data repositories (like databases) or semi-structured data (e.g., www pages, news articles) or unstructured data (such as text or binary files). The Diorama system consists of several components that extract properties from unstructured data or collect data through other information brokers/mediators, and dynamically convert and assemble gathered information into DIOM objects.

DIOM is an acronym for Distributed Interoperable Object Model, which is developed as an extension to ODMG object model. The objectives of the DIOM development are to facilitate Internet users to integrate, combine, and manage data extracted from autonomous and yet heterogeneous information sources. It promotes the support of the USECA properties: Uniform access user interface to its components, Scalability to the larger networks, adaptability to system Evolution, Composability of interface designs and client/server components, and full respect of Autonomy.

To address the research issues presented by such systems, we introduce the Distributed Interoperable Object Model (DIOM). DIOM s main features include:

the mechanisms for explicitly capturing source-specific query capabilities information through the semi-automatic construction of DIOM base interfaces;

the use of interface abstraction mechanisms (such as specialization, generalization, aggregation and import) to support incremental design and construction of compound interoperation interfaces, which allows the seamless incorporation of the growing number of incoming information sources and provides the DIOM consumers with scalable and continuous services;

the deferment of source-specific representational and semantic conflict resolution to the query processing time instead of requiring an integrated global view schema; and

the systematic development of adaptive query mediation architecture, which consists of the most basic and necessary distributed query services such as query routing, query decomposition, parallel access planning, subquery submission, subquery result packaging, and global result assembly.

the adaptive, on-the-fly restructuring of complex query plans to cope with unexpected unavailability of the information sources or delays of wide-area networks.

Architecture and Tools

The Diorama/DIOM adopts the mediator-based framework (see I3 Reference Architecture). The Diorama mediator architecture is still evolving at the moment.

Feel free to use the following tools that have been developed or under development. Your suggestions and comments may send directly to lingliu@cc.gatech.edu or disl@cc.gatech.edu

ATTENTION: Currently some of our tools are under revision and some are under development. Please return to this page for updates. Thank you.

Diorama Proof of Concept Demo
Wrapper Query Tool
Distributed Query Optimization Toolkit (DQS)

    DQS Java Class Library

    Register and download DQS Java Source

NetNews Monitoring
Harvest Change Notification Service

Faculty

Dr. Ling Liu, Associate Professor.
Dr. Calton Pu, Professor.

Students

Dave Buttler, Ph.D. Student
Wei Tang, Ph.D. Student.
Tong Zhou, PhD Candidate.

Past members

John Biggs, Research Programmer.
Dheeraj Madadi, Graduate Student.
Yoo-Shin Lee, Graduate Student.
Kirill Richine, Graduate Student.
Karim Makhani
Uwe Thiemann, Visiting Researcher.

Related Projects

The XWrap Project
The Query Router Project
The CQ/Continual Queries Project
The Heterodyne Project
The ActivityFlow/TAM Project
The Synthetix Project
The ESR Project