In the near future, extracting data from multiple, heterogeneous data sources and presenting the data in XML "containers" is likely to become a common and frequent business and computation need. The goal of this project is to study the issues involved in fulfilling this need, and to construct a system that achieves such functionality.For example, consider how a product report may be generated. The price information may come from the database in the sales department, including all the promotion information and special discounts to selected customers, etc. The quantity information may come the warehouse or the supply-chain system. The product description may include sales documents from the sales department, technical descriptions from the R&D department, etc. To generate this report, one may manually collect the relevant data from various sources and compile them. An alternative is to write a program that automatically extracts data and produce the report. However, this would involve nontrivial programming and interfacing with various systems, and most likely would need to be re-done for new report types or data sources. It would be very helpful, if all it takes to generate this report is the same level of effort as authoring an XML document.
The goals of the XAS system are to
- Enable rapid exploitation of existing enterprise data by new XML eCommerce applications
- At the same time, support co-existence with existing enterprise applications.
- Support storage and retrieval of XML data in current enterprise data formats.
- Automatic composition /decomposition of XML documents from /to multiple enterprise data sources.
- Facilitate the management, re-use and sharing of data composition logic.
