i2x: An Automated Real-Time Integration and Interoperability Platform (Short Paper)

In the age of cloud computing, the amount of data and services available for researchers continues to grow. As data are easier to generate and services simpler to deploy, researchers continue to face insurmountable integration and interoperability challenges. A major ongoing issue across many fields regards the automated and real-time integration of data and services. Besides aggregating and processing disparate sources, we need an always up-to-date view of our heterogeneous and distributed datasets. Enabling realistic insights over acquired information requires that data are as fresh as possible. This perspective appears in opposition to traditional warehousing strategies, where data are manipulated regularly over large intervals. Our proposal introduces a reactive and event-driven framework to simplify and automate real-time data integration and interoperability. This platform, entitled i2x, streamlines the creation of customizable integration tasks connecting heterogeneous data sources with any kind of services. Integration is poll-based, with intelligent agents monitoring data sources, or push-based, where the platform waits for data submission by external resources. I2X delivers data to services through a comprehensive template engine, where the platform maps data from the original data source to the destination resources. I2X is an open-source framework available online at https://bioinformatics.ua.pt/i2x/.