New trends in information integration

The growth of organizations invariably leads to creation of multiple isolated data sources which are totally disconnected from each other. This leads to reduced efficiency and lack of complete knowledge of the enterprise and its customers while making critical business decisions. This is the classical Information integration problem which has become the biggest pain point for enterprises today. Information Integration has received considerable attention from researchers in academia as well as industry in the recent past. Information integration refers to the category of middleware which lets applications access data as though there were in a single database. It enables the integration of data and content sources so as to provide real-time read and write access, transform data for business analysis and data interchange, and data placement for performance, currency and availability. The integration problem arises mainly due to the complex and heterogeneous environments in the enterprise. Typical example applications of information integration include: integrating the transcribed calls records with the data warehouse, integrating the patient reports with the relational data about the patients, integrating mobile phone call description records made from different regions, integrating inventory and store information from different warehouses etc.