Automatic generation and publication of Web services for the access and integration of distributed data sources

In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a multiplatform integrated graphical tool for the automatic creation, management, and publication of Web services for the access and publication (in the Web) of query operations (SQL sentences, stored procedures and views) executed over local or distributed relational data sources stored in heterogeneous platforms. The result sets generated by the execution of the operations associated to each Web service are codified in XML. The tool described: i) simplify the query process to distributed DBMS data sources; ii) simplify the information interchange between heterogeneous and homogeneous systems; iii) automates the creation of Web services through a graphical interface without have knowledge of a programming language. The tool was implemented in Java using free software APIs and has been proved with several DBMS. We show the results of some tests realized to our tool and the comparisons with similar approaches. This work is a first step towards a technological solution of the data integration problem.