Designing service marts for engineering search computing applications

Abstract

The use of patterns in data management is not new: in data warehousing, data marts are simple conceptual schemas with exactly one core entity, describing facts, surrounded by multiple entities, describing data analysis dimensions; data marts support special analysis operations, such as roll up, drill down, and cube. Similarly, Service Marts are simple schemas which match "Web objects" by hiding the underlying data source structures and presenting a simple interface, consisting of input, output, and rank attributes; attributes may have multiple values and be clustered within repeating groups. Service Marts support Search Computing operations, such as ranked access and service compositions. When objects are accessed through Service Marts, responses are ranked lists of objects, which are presented subdivided in chunks, so as to avoid receiving too many irrelevant objects - cutting results and showing only the best ones is typical of search services. This paper gives a formal definition of Service Marts and shows how Service Marts can be implemented and used for building Search Computing applications. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.