Mediating Among Diverse Data Formats

Thesis Defense Slides

John Ockerbloom - 20 January 1998

• Mediating Among Diverse Data Formats .
• The Information Explosion .
• The Problem: A Babel of Data Formats .
• Someone sent me a map... .
• ...but I got it like this! .
• Why current techniques don't solve the problem... .
• Why emerging technologies won't solve the problem... .
• The TOM solution: Key ideas .
• Thesis statement .
• What do I mean by "superior"? .
• Remainder of this talk .
• Sending my mail message to TOM .
• Making the map viewable via TOM .
• TOM Basic Data Concepts .
• Immutable objects? .
• Example: A simple mail message as a TOM object .
• Part of the TOM type hierarchy .
• Substitutable types? .
• What can you do with an object in an unfamiliar format? .
• TOM's architecture (1) .
• TOM's architecture (2) .
• TOM's architecture (3) .
• TOM's architecture (4) .
• Type brokers .
• Brokers enable smart conversions .
• Intersubstitutable types? .
• Validation .
• Scalability: Graceful Distributed Expansion of Type Graph .
• Composability : Ease of Integration .
• Experience with TOM .
• TOM makes new formats easy to integrate .
• Summary .
• Related Work .
• Contributions .
• Future Work .
• (Extra slide) Can TOM design evolve gracefully? .
• (Extra slide) Some conversions were difficult to do in TOM .
• (Extra slide) Examples of multi-level encoding .
• (Extra slide) How to convert compound objects? .