III-COR: Collaborative Research: The Morpheus Data Transformation Management System

University Of Florida, Gainesville FL

Investigators

Abstract

The goal of this research project is to facilitate the sharing of information across enterprise boundaries, by facilitating the integration of separately constructed data bases. Because such data bases never have identical content, it is necessary to write transforms (or adaptors) to convert such disparate data into a common form. The construction of such transforms is widely believed to be a major cost of data integration projects. The purpose of the Morpheus project is to capture a large number of such transforms in a repository by crawling the web for publicly available ones and providing high level tools for efficient transform construction. In addition, powerful browsing tools are anticipated that allow users to locate ""interesting"" transforms quickly in the repository by providing keyword search of documentation, search within a classification hierarchy of transforms, search by the provenance of transforms, as well as search by the input/output characteristics. Morpheus is expected to dramatically reduce the cost of writing and maintaining data integration transforms, which will ease the difficulty of future data integration projects. This project will support graduate students at both Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Florida. In addition, transform construction will be used as student exercises in data base classes at both institutions. Further information can be obtained from the project web site: http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~jhammer/morpheus/ where research results will be disseminated and prototype code will be available.