Data Integration and Workflows

For several years workflows have been used as a means of orchestrating Web services (among other tasks). The increased availability nowadays of on-line data resources has created the need of an efficient way of accessing and integrating this data. workflows, orchestrating services that access these resources, seem like the natural way to accomplish said task but how does this relate to work in data integration? Significant work on data integration has been done over the last decades and although there is still progress to be made, the field is quite mature. However, the open, widely distributed and autonomous nature of Web services introduces some issues to the traditional integration methodologies.

This presentation, aiming to stimulate discussion of the subject, will give a very brief overview of the mediation approach to integration and then discuss this in relation to workflows and the ways the latter could be useful for data integration. In this context it will also discuss the OGSA-DAI project and its rational for data access and integration using workflows and Service-Oriented Architectures.