Building portals for E-biology

Electronic business and in particular systems developed for Business-to-Customer (B2C) mainly focused on making data (catalogues) available on the Web. However, the emergence of new business applications and business-to-business (B2B) makes it necessary to build portals not only based on data integration together with restricted query facilities such as developed for B2C, but based on data (hosted locally or in Web sites) and application integration instead. Building such a portal requires accessing and manipulating data extracted from flat files or databases, documents retrieved from the Web as well as data generated by any application available locally or at the Web site. We present an approach to wrapping Web data sources, databases, flat files, or data generated by tools through a database view mechanism. Generally a wrapper has two tasks: it first sends a query to the source to retrieve data and, secondly builds the expected output with respect to the virtual structure. Our wrappers are composed of a retrieval component based on an intermediate object view mechanism called search views mapping the source capabilities to attributes, and a XML extractor to perform respectively these two tasks. The originality of the approach consists of: (1) a generic view mechanism to seamlessly access data sources, and (2) the ability to wrap data sources as well as the useful specific tools they may provide. Our approach has been developed and demonstrated as part of the multi-database system supporting queries via uniform Object Protocol Model (OPM) interfaces, used to build biological portals for pharmaceutical companies