Deshpande Center - Information Technology Projects

Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation

	INFO BIO NANO MACRO ENVIRO


	Information Technology at MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Center for Biological and Computational Learning Center for Transportation and Logistics d'Arbeloff Laboratory for Information Systems and Technology Laboratory for Computer Science Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems Media Lab Project Oxygen (LCS) Research Laboratory for Electronics

NEXT-GENERATION DATA TRANSFORMATION TOOL

Michael Stonebraker
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

A fundamental problem for large enterprises revolves around converting data from various representations inside the logic of business units to one common representation in the enterprises central data warehouse. Business analysts subsequently query this warehouse to improve business processes.

While tools do exist to extract data from various locations and transform them into a common format, such exercises are usually complex and expensive. Moreover, todays modern business environment necessitates frequent changes in the data structures of business units. This makes such transformation exercises an ongoing issue. The goal of this project is to create a next-generation data transformation tool to facilitate these conversions.

The core technology is called Morpheus (the Greek god of dreams, who could change his form and appearance) that consists of a transformation tool and a repository that holds a large number of transformations. Morpheus would be used as a browser tool, finding a repository transformation that is "close" to the required one. Then, the transformation tool is used to manipulate the identified starting point in a drag-and-drop fashion quickly and easily into the desired result.