19th International CODATA Conference
Category: Interoperability

Technological Aspects Of Heterogeneous Information Resources Integration

Dr. Sc. Evgeny Vyazilov (vjaz@meteo.ru), Nickolay Mikhailov, Sergey Belov, Sergey Sukhonosov, Vladislav Chepurnov
All-Russian Research Institute of Hydrometeorological Information – World Data Centre, Russia
http://www.meteo.ru, http://www.oceaninfo.ru, http://copi.ru/31569

The Unified System on the State of the World Ocean (ESIMO) is a system of distributed databases built on information systems currently operated by various Ministries and Agencies of Russia. These systems are heterogeneous information resources (IR) based on different principles and tools.

The ESIMO developers have chosen a Web-oriented technology for integration of IR. ESIMO is a network of data sources located in the institutions directly involved in ESIMO and in related organizations (national and international) in the form of bases containing operational, historical data and climatic, diagnostic and prognostic information as well as in the form of software applications implemented in the multi-aspect (language, program, linguistic) environment. Access to IR is through web-portal ESIMO (http://data.meteo.ru:8080/resource/index.jsp).

Integration is built on the unified IR description model, the unified vocabulary of parameters, the multivariate approaches to the database development, the storage of documents and images in the form of file systems. This approaches diversified and semistructured IR to be managed through:

• Unique identification of data sources;
• Uniform access to all IR and the use of specific search attributes for different forms of information representation (text, factographic, graphic) and different types of information (observation data, analyses, prognoses, climatic);
• Application of several access methods depending on specific features of a data source (HTML pages, ftp-files, databases).

Along with data and information products on marine environment and marine-related activities the technology allows the electronic copies documents to be included into ESIMO. The system provides for the remote input of IR descriptions into the database. IR description ensures the automated search, address to IR and its elements (time series, grid) by topics (sphere, process, parameters), geographical regions, IR authors. The portal provides the development of personalized pages for specific users interested in different topics. The ESIMO web-portal administrative service is responsible for the monitoring of visits of IR, as well as for the registration and access to IR. To maintain and use the portal a multi-component and cross-platform information-program complex has been developed. The core of the complex ensures the management and storage of IR descriptions and metadata in Oracle 9i DBMS. The user interface is based on J2EE technologies.