4.
Implement wrappers for various data sources
and describe the resulting wrappers and asso-
ciated data sources as HTML documents.
5. Implement a Java based extension to a
browser for displaying structured data as ta-
bles, graphs, or images.
6. Study the feasibility of a language for the
description of dependencies between data
sources, data, and meta data that results from
computation of new data based on existing
data.
Acknowledgments Thanks to Luc Bouganim and
Marcin Skubiszewski for comments on this text.
Thanks to Gregory Becker, Matthew Jackson
Keiran Millard, Claire Waelbroeck, and Robert
[5] Proceedings of the First IEEE Metadata Con-
ference, NOAA, Silver Spring, Maryland,
1996. http://www.nml.org/resources/misc/
metadata/proceedings/meta home.html.
[6] Won Kim. Modern Database Systems. ACM
Press, New York, NY, 1995.
[7] Carl Lagoze, Cliord A. Lynch, and Ron
Daniel. The warwick framework: A con-
tainer architecture for aggregating sets
of metadata. Technical Report TR96-
1593, Cornell University, 1996. http://cs-
tr.cs.cornell.edu:80/Dienst/UI/2.0/Describe/
ncstrl.cornell
[8] Alberto O. Mendelzon, George A. Mihaila, and
Tova Milo. Querying the world wide web. In
Proceedings of Parallel and Distributed Infor-
Woodley for discussions on scientic systems. mation Systems, Miami Beach, Florida, 1996.
To Appear.
References [9] Anthony Tomasic, Louiqa Raschid, and
Patrick Valduriez. A data model and query
[1] C. Mic Bowman, Peter B. Danzig, Darren R. processing techniques for scaling access to dis-
Hardy, Udi Manber, and Michael F. Schwartz. tributed heterogeneous databases in Disco.
Harvest: A scalable, customizable discovery IEEE Transactions on Computers, 1996. To
and access system. Technical Report CU- Appear.
CS-732-94, Department of Computer Science,
University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, [10] R. Y. Wang, M. P. Reddy, and H. B. Kon.
August 1994. Toward quality data: An attribute-based ap-
proach. Decision Support Systems, 13:349{
[2] Dienst Project. Dienst protocol version 4.0. 372, 1995.
http://www.ncstrl.org/Dienst/htdocs/Info/
protocol4.html, October 1995.
[3] Luis Gravano, Hector Garcia-Molina, and
Anthony Tomasic. The eectiveness of
GlOSS for the text database discovery
problem. In Proceedings of 1994 ACM
SIGMOD International Conference on Man-
agement of Data, Minneapolis, MN, 1994.
ftp://db.stanford.edu/pub/gravano/1994/stan.
cs.tn.93.002.sigmod94.ps.
[4] Joachim Hammer, Hector Garcia-Molina,
Kelly Ireland, Yannis Papakonstantinou, Jef-
frey Ullman, and Jennifer Widom. Informa-
tion translation, mediation, and Mosaic-based
browsing in the TSIMMIS system. In Proceed-
ings of SIGMOD '95, 1995. SIGMOD System
Demonstration.

5
sists of a pair { an HTML document describing sents shark attack reports in French newspapers.
the component, and the collection of objects that In this case, Jim Data Provider has also provided
implement the metadata, data, and computation. the translation program. Finally, dotted box e rep-
The HTML document provides a means (through resents a mediator that describes safe beaches for
indexing engines) for locating the corresponding
objects. A data source, for instance a database sys-
tem, exports metadata (a schema), data, compu-
tation (query processing) encapsulated as objects.
All of these objects are described in the associated
wind surng, based on the predicted wave data and
recent reported shark attacks. The components of a
through d consists of a mix of code from the under-
lying systems and the proposed architecture. The
mediator e can be written entirely within the pro-
HTML document. The document has sucient in- posed system. For Joe Windsurfer, the task of nd-
formation to permit direct browsing of the data by
an (intelligent) browser that understands the query
language supported by the data source. A transla-
tor provides conversion of queries between two dif-
ferent query languages { the language 1 supported
by the data source, and the language 2 generated
as subqueries by the mediator. This functionality
is again encapsulated as objects and described in
an HTML document. For instance, the signatures
of the functions supported by the translator are de-
scribed. Thus, a browser that generates queries in
language 1 can browse data in a data source ac-
ing a safe beach consists of surng to the HTML
page associated with e. Jane Mayor will examine
the metadata of e to determine the analysis that
leads to a judgment of a safe beach.
Our goal is to create an environment of \mix and
match" mediators, each of which documents a step
in the production of environmental data.
4 Conclusion
In this position paper, we have presented a model
cepting language 2 given the appropriate transla- for the tasks involved in the generation of scientic
tor. The mediators encode the tasks of consolidata- data. We showed that this model induces a hierar-
tion, aggregation, analysis, and interpretation. The chy of data. Finally, we proposed an architecture
associated HTML document describes the scientic
models used for the task and the object describes
the metadata and data of the results. Some media-
tors may support the invocation of the computation
used to generate the data. All mediators conform
to the same language for queries, metadata, and
data.
to support these activities.
Our proposed architecture draws on research and
commercial heterogeneous distributed databases
[9, 6] and on work on semi-structured data sources
[4, 1, 3]. Our focus will be on the crossing of object-
oriented technology with information retrieval pro-
tocols [2, 8, 7].
Returning to the example in the previous section,
we describe each part of Figure 3. The dotted box
a around a data source represents a database of his-
torical wave data, including wave height, force of a
wave, etc. for every beach in France. This data is
generated by a government authority and exported
directly to the WWW. The dotted box b around an-
other data source represents current meteorological
The construction of a rst prototype breaks down
into several tasks.
1. Adapt an existing data model and metadata
model into a language for describing environ-
mental data. Instances of the resulting lan-
guage are parts of an HTML document.
data, also produced by a government authority and 2. Adapt the Java applet interface specication
also exported directly to the WWW. Both of these
data sources are managed by Jim Data Provider.
Dotted box c represents the work of Jack Scien-
tist, who has written translators of the two data
sources (into the standard mediator language) and
constructed a mediator which exports predictions of
wave data based on the historical database and the
current weather patterns. Thus, the analysis task
is presented here. The fourth dotted box d repre-
4
into a language for the specication of inter-
faces to wrappers. Instance of the resulting
language are also parts of an HTML document.
The applets can read data located at sources
and display the results in a World Wide Web
browser.
3. Validate the language by describing various
data sources in the language.
 D Mediator
HTML Object e
Qi, Qb Analysis
Mediator c

HTML Object
D D Translator
HTML Object
Translator Translator
Qi, Qb Consolidate, Aggregate Data Source HTML Object HTML Object
HTML Object
Data Source Data Source
d
D D HTML Object HTML Object
a b

Q Q Locate
Figure 3: The proposed architecture. Dotted
Select
boxes show process (and administration) bound-
B D B B D aries. Lines show exchange of queries and updates.
Figure 2: A
ow of processes. The successive iterations produce data that is in-
creasingly processed. Thus, the iterations naturally
is to generate data by consolidation, aggregation, organize the data into a graph based on the tasks
analysis and interpretation. These activities are used to produce the data. Figure 2 shows the ex-
interrelated, as shown in Figure 1. ample of such a graph. Circles represent data and
Each arrow in the gure indicates a precedence thin boxes, or transitions, represent the application
relationship between the tasks. The tasks are de- of tasks. Directed arcs represent the transforma-
ned as follows. tional
ow of data. On the bottom, base and de-
rived data (resp. circles marked \B" and \D") are
Store Raw data is dened, measured, and stored
by Jim Data Provider. In addition, other users
store the results of other tasks here.
Locate and Extract Data is located and ex-
tracted by Joe Windsurfer, Jane Mayor and
Jack Scientist.
Consolidate and Aggregate Jack Scientist con-
solidates data by creating new sets of data that
approximate missing data in raw data source.
In addition data is aggregated into larger mea-
surements.
Analyze and Interpret Jack Scientist analyzes
and interprets data and generates new data
from the results of this task. Both this
task and the previous task are accomplished Figure 3 shows a diagram of our proposed archi-
the input of two transitions implementing locate
and select tasks. The result of these transitions is
stored as derived data, which in turn are the input
of a transition implementing a consolidate and ag-
gregate task. The result, stored as derived data, is
taken as an input of a last transition which returns
the result of an analysis and interpretation (e.g.,
high-level indicators). Quality factors are indicated
as annotations for the transitions: Qi, and Qb re-
spectively mean interpretable and believable, while
Q means all quality factors. In the next section, an
architecture is proposed for supporting these activ-
ities and resulting hierarchy.
3 Architecture
through the use of scientic models. tecture; it is similar in structure to heterogeneous
distributed database systems [9]. The architecture
Each iteration around the four tasks produces consists of three types of components: data sources,
new data that is available for further iterations. translators, and mediators. Each component con-

3
 are represented as dots of varying colors ac-
cording to their degree of safety. Or Joe lo- locate
cates a WWW server running an ad-hoc pro- select
gram that delivers useful documents to wind-
surfers, which include descriptions of the safety
of beaches.
Policy-Maker Jane Mayor (e.g., the Mayor of a consolidate store
city) aggregate
Jane needs to locate appropriate data servers
to retrieve data of the desired level of qual-
ity. For example, Jane accesses the rating of
beaches in her town. Then, she asks why her
town is not considered a safe beach. As a re- analyze
interpret
sult, she gets a denition of a safe beach that is
understandable to her, i.e., at the appropriate
level of detail, and the data that the deni- Figure 1: Four activities for producing environmen-
tion depends on. For instance, safety may be tal data.
dened as a collection of criteria such as the
expected height of waves, presence of rocks,
presence of sharks, and water quality.
Since Jane may never have heard of shark at-
Data Provider Jim Data Provider (e.g., Biolo-
gist)
Jim collects data, and he wants to distribute
tacks on her beach, she then may want to nd
out who, and when, collected the data about
the presence of sharks near her beaches. Com-
pared to Joe Windsurfer, Jane has a higher
requirement on data quality: she puts a high
value on accessibility, interpretability, and use-
it as widely and as easily as possible. Jim may
manually add his data to an existing database
through a standard form-based entry system.
Data can also be collected using automatic sen-
sors that directly transmit their data to an
fulness. She wants to query the unied view associated system. In this case, Jim has to
that is presented to her by means of easy- verify the quality of data, and eliminate erro-
to-use interfaces, and consequently the server neous measurements. To do this, Jim needs to
must be able to process ad hoc queries.
Scientist Jack Scientist (e.g., Environmental Sci-
entist)
Jack constructs the servers for Jane Mayor and
Joe Windsurfer. Jack writes programs which
read measurement databases, administrative
use specic programs for data analysis and in-
terpretation and access other data systems for
comparing his data with other related data.
In general, any individual in the real world may
play the role of multiple generic users described
here. Current data system technology, at least in
the environmental domain, is very simple. Data
enquiries, remote sensing data, and geograph- is stored in les. Metadata is stored as textual
ical databases, to construct a map of France descriptions in associated les (that is, metadata
that indicates the quality of beaches. Also, he does not have any formal language). Extraction
writes programs to improve the reliability of of data consists of ad-hoc programs (that is, query
data. languages are not used). Metadata for the results
Generally, Jack must nd the data required for
each new program that he writes. In addition,
each new program uses multiple data sources.
Each data source requires a unique program to
extract the data for the new program from a
data source.
2
of analysis are described in scientic papers. Thus,
there is no formal language for describing the data
itself.
From a task point of view, Joe and Jane's prin-
cipal activity is to locate data servers and select
relevant data. Jack and Jim's principal activity
 Improving Access to Scientic Data
Position Paper, Second DELOS Workshop, Bonn, Germany

Anthony Tomasic Eric Simon

INRIA Rocquencourt INRIA Rocquencourt 
September 19, 1996

1 Introduction By \quality," we mean [10] that data must be:

accessible, i.e., delivered eciently, interpretable,
Users who interact with scientic data systems face i.e., easily and unambiguously understood, useful,
many problems accessing scientic data. Because i.e., relevant and timely, believable, i.e., complete,
of the heterogeneous nature of these systems, data consistent, and accurate.
is dicult to locate, poorly documented, dicult This position paper provides a conceptual analy-
to understand, and dicult to use. By \data" we sis of these problems for users of scientic data sys-
mean both data resulting from probes of phenom- tems. The analysis describes the four major tasks
ena and information resulting from scientic mod- in the production of scientic data (from the tech-
els. nology point of view). The analysis then describes
Anecdotal evidence shows that current data sys- the organization of the data that results from these
tem technology in scientic research consists of a tasks. Based on this analysis, we propose an ar-
wide variety of tools and techniques, but some gen- chitecture for scientic data systems that formally
eralizations are possible. Data storage consists of models metadata and focuses on the two major
large collections of les. Each le records, usually goals described above.
in tabular format, a series of measurements from Section 2 describes a conceptual model of tasks
probes of phenomena. File sizes are generally small, for the production of scientic data. Section 3 pro-
ranging in the low megabyte range. (A major ex- poses an architecture. Section 4 concludes the pa-
ception to this generalization is raw satellite image per.
data.) Metadata consists of text descriptions of
each eld, located either at the beginning of the le
or in a another le in an associated directory. Doc- 2 Conceptual Analysis
umentation of results derived from raw data is typ- The conceptual analysis of scientic data systems
ically accomplished by publication in the scientic consists of three parts: the users, the tasks for pro-
literature. Some areas of scientic research do use duction of data, and the resulting data organiza-
databases [5], or at least are converging on standard tion. To make the discussion more concrete, we
metadata descriptions, but here again, the docu- focus on a hypothetical example of an environmen-
mentation of the metadata usually resides in text tal data system.
les. We distinguish between several categories of
A better architecture for scientic data would users based on the data each user needs from an
support two major goals: (a) diminishing the work environmental data system.
required of each user to participate in or interactive
with scientic data systems, and (b) improving the
quality of data delivered to users.
 INRIA Rocquencourt, 78153 Le Chesnay, France;
mailto:Anthony.Tomasic@inria.fr; http://rodin.inria.fr/.
End User Joe Windsurfer
Joe needs to locate data that matches his in-
terest. For example, Joe locates a WWW page
that shows the map of France where beaches