An Open Approach for Data Integration

Data integration, also called sometimes object-oriented interoperability, aims at adapting existing data structures and data instances to achieve software systems (application programs, development tools, etc) interoperability. In this paper, data integration is viewed as a process that attempts to build a subtype relationship between two data structures: a source one and a target one. The source data structure is the actual representation of data a software system S 1 has created and the target one is the data representation admitted as input by a software system S 2 . The objective of the data integration process is to make S 1 's outputs conform to S 2 's inputs, i.e. object-oriented interoperability, as opposed to process-oriented interoperability, adapts data rather than the software system's code. The proposed process rst compares both the data structures, then it tries to restructure the source one into the target one. If the process is successful, the source data occurrence ..