Unifying heterogeneous information models
Narinder Pal Singh · Communications of the ACM · 1998
. With the explosion of the Web and the Internet, organizations can tap into into a vast variety of information sources to create new applications that increase the productivity and efficiency of its employees, customers, and partners. For example, consider an application that allows a salesman to check the financial health of a customer's company (getting information from the Web), check if a customer has any outstanding bills (by examining the accounting database), find new product offerings (from a products database), and check if a new product is available (by examining an inventory database). The difficulty is in creating and maintaining such distributed applications. Information sources are distributed and independently managed, which results in sources with incompatible information models, and models that change dynamically. The traditional approach to creating and maintaining such applications requires a team of programmers. Software libraries can help unify the API of the diff...