A service-oriented system for distributed data querying and integration on Grids

Data Grids rely on the coordinated sharing of and interaction across multiple autonomous database management systems. They provide transparent access to heterogeneous and autonomous data resources stored on Grid nodes. Data sharing tools for Grids must include both distributed query processing and data integration functionality. This paper presents the implementation of a data sharing system that (i) is tailored to data Grids, (ii) supports well established and widely spread relational DBMSs, and (iii) adopts a hybrid architecture by relying on a peer model for query reformulation to retrieve semantically equivalent expressions, and on a wrapper-mediator integration model for accessing and querying distributed data sources. The system builds upon the infrastructure provided by the OGSA-DQP distributed query processor and the XMAP query reformulation algorithm. The paper discusses the implementation methodology, and presents empirical evaluation results. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.