Functional Data Integration in a Distributed Mediator System

Amos II (Active Mediator Object System) is a distributed mediator system that uses a functional data model and has a relationally complete functional query language, AmosQL. Through its distributed multi-database facilities many autonomous and distributed Amos II peers can interoperate. Functional multi-database queries and views can be defined where external data sources of different kinds are translated through Amos II and reconciled through its functional mediation primitives. Each mediator peer provides a number of transparent functional views of data reconciled from other mediator peers, wrapped data sources, and data stored in Amos II itself. The composition of mediator peers in terms of other peers provides a way to scale the data integration process by composing mediation modules. The Amos II data manager and query processor are extensible so that new application oriented data types and operators can be added to AmosQL, implemented in some external programming language (Java, C, or Lisp). The extensibility allows wrapping data representations specialized for different application areas in mediator peers. The functional data model provides very powerful query and data integration primitives which require advanced query optimization.