System and method of integrating time-aware data from multiple sources

• US 9,881,047 B2
• Filed: 07/01/2016
• Issued: 01/30/2018
• Est. Priority Date: 12/16/2013
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Roth, Mary A, Tan, Wang-Chiew
• Primary Examiner(s): LE, HUNG D
• Application Number:
  US15/201,159
• Publication Number:
  US 20160314165A1
• Time in Patent Office: 578 Days
• Field of Search: None
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/2365 Ensuring data consistency and integrity
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/25 Integrating or interfacing systems involving database management systems
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/258 Data format conversion from or to a database
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/83 Querying

Abstract

A time-aware union operator is disclosed for consistent integration of time-aware data, wherein the time-aware union produces a time-aware consistent integrated view of underlying sources according to specified key constraints and policies. The implementation of time-aware union is idempotent, commutative, and associative, thus making it suitable for data integration, and it produces the same integrated outcome, modulo representation of time, regardless of the order in which sources are integrated.

Claims

1. A computer based method comprising:

receiving an input schema S;

receiving two instances, T₁ and T₂, each of which conforms to said input schema, S;

computing a merged instance of T₁ and T₂, T₁ T₂, as an instance that also conforms to S such that every path in T₁ or T₂ can be found in T₁ T₂, every path in T₁ T₂ can be found in T₁ or T₂, and a temporal context associated with an element in any path in T₁ T₂ is a result of adjusting temporal contexts of corresponding elements in T₁ and/or T₂ under the same path according to a given adjustment policy, said given adjustment policy designed to resolve time conflicts between data records having time conflicts, where said merged instance T₁ T₂ provides an integrated view of instances T₁ and T₂ by fusing identical elements in instances T₁ and/or T₂ together and providing an interpretation of their corresponding temporal contexts according to said given adjust policy;

storing said merged instance T₁ T₂ as a time-consistent integrated profile; and

evaluating a timeslice query based on the time-consistent integrated profile.

2. The computer-based method of claim 1, wherein said computer-based method is implemented as part of a parallel database system.

3. The computer-based method of claim 1, wherein said outputted merged instance T₁ T₂ is one among many intermediate results and said computer-based method further comprises the step of merging and outputting all said intermediate results.

4. The computer-based method of claim 1, wherein said outputted merged instance T₁ T₂ comprise a concise and complete temporal history of all data records such that a history of an entity associated with the data records is retrievable via a standard XML manipulation language.

5. The computer-based method of claim 4, wherein said standard XML, manipulation language is XPath.