The HERMES HeterogeneousReasoning and Mediator System
V.S. SubrahmanianUniversity of Maryland
[These slides originated from the HERMES Project sponsored by DARPA’s Intelligent Information Integration Program from 1993
to 1996.]
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Motivation
Complex reasoning systems need to: access very diverse, heterogeneous
data sources across the Internet access different software packages
(also located across the Internet) to manipulate this data.
Mediators are programs that perform such integrations.
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HERMES Domains
Ingres, Paradox, dBase, flat files. Text databases. Multimedia data: image data, text
data, video. Reasoning systems: nonlinear
planner, Army terrain reasoner, face recognition algorithms.
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HERMES Platforms
SunOS 4.1.3, Solaris, Linux Windows 3.1, Windows NT
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HERMES Overview
HERMES is not a mediator. It is a platform for building mediators for different applications.
HERMES splits the task of building mediators into two tasks: Package Integration Semantic Integration
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Package Integration HERMES mediators make calls to
external data sources using the syntax:
p:f(<args>) This says “execute function f
defined in package p on the specified arguments.”
Package integration is the process by which predefined functions of external packages are executable in this way.
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Semantic Integration
HERMES uses a rule-based language to semantically integrate external data.
in(X, p:f(<args>)) is a special predicate that allows external accesses. It is satisfied if and only if X is in (or can be made to point to) an object returned by the call p:f(<args>).
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Semantic Integration (cont.)
Here is an example that accesses two data sources:in(X, ingres:select(‘facility.rel’, “Item”, “=“, “oscilloscope”)) &
in(Y, paradox:select(‘weather.rel’, “Place”, “=“, X.Location)) &
=(Y.WeatherMap, Map).
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WebHERMES Provides a simple HTML interface
that an end user may use to access multiple databases.
Provides facilities for automatic query relaxation.
Can access WWW sources as a result of a query. Connected to Lycos and InfoSeek WWW search engines.
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More HERMES Information
V.S. Subrahmanian, ProfessorDepartment of Computer Science University of MarylandCollege Park, MD 20742Telephone: (301) 405-6724E-mail: [email protected]: www.cs.umd.edu/~vs
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