Versatile: a scalable CORBA-based system for integrating distributed data

Issues on data integration have become the focus of database research for more than a decade. Now data sources are increasingly diversified, such as traditional databases, file systems, WWW, multimedia databases etc. on various platforms. Today it is a great challenge to integrate so many kinds of distributed data sources. Based on an investigation of existing data integration approaches, we believe that integrating data by employing distributed object technology is a promising approach. We present a data integration system, named Versatile, which is a scalable CORBA-based system for integrating distributed data, and has following features: a common data model, Object Model for Integration (OIM) and a data manipulation language, Object Integration Query Language (OIQL) for integrating heterogeneous data; Versatile supports as many user-level object views as needed; and CORBA is used as the underlying structure for data integration. All components of Versatile are encapsulated as CORBA objects, so other data sources can join the system in a "plug and play" way. The system architecture, OIM, query processing as well as Object Inspector, which is a smart graphical user interface of Versatile are introduced.