Information discovery in polystores: The augmented way

Polystores provide a loosely coupled integration of heterogeneous data sources based on the direct access, with the local language, to each storage engine for exploiting its distinctive features. In this framework, given the absence of a middleware exposing a global schema, it is hard to know if a query to one system can be satisfied by data stored elsewhere in the polystore. We address this problem by illustrating query augmentation, a data manipulation operator for polystores based on the automatic enrichment of the answer to a local query with related data in the rest of the polystore. Augmentation can be used to implement augmented search and augmented exploration: two effective methods for information discovery in polystores that avoid middleware layers, abstract query languages, and shared data models.