DXBrain is a lightweight distributed data integration system originally constructed for querying the UW Human Brain Project data network. The DXBrain system wraps a number of data sources, of various data models and/or storage formats, in web services which accept XQueries as input and return XML results. Another component of the system, the Distributed XQuery Processor (DXQP), provides an XQuery library that allows query snippets to be targetted to specific data source wrappers. The DXQP takes XQueries as input, breaks them down into the underlying targetted query snippets, sends these queries to the appropriate source wrappers, and then combines the source results into a unified XML result document. Additionally DXBrain provides a user interface allowing users to construct queries, save queries, execute queries, and view query results. Query results can be viewed as XML, HTML, CSV or by either of two visualization methods; superimposed on a 2D annotated brain map or within the MindSeer 3D brain visualizer.
Demo query showing the main features of the system..