Managing heterogeneous information systems through discovery and retrievalof generic concepts

Autonomy of operations combined with decentralized management of data gives rise to a number of heterogeneous databases or information systems within an enterprise. These systems are often incompatible in structure as well as content and, hence, difficult to integrate. Depsite heterogeneity, the uni ty of overall purpose within a common application domain, nevertheless, pro vides a degree of semantic similarity that manifests itself in the form of similar data structures and common usage patterns of existing information s ystems. This article introduces a conceptual integration approach that expl oits the similarity in metalevel information in existing systems and perfor ms metadata mining on database objects to discover a set of concepts that s erve as a domain abstraction and provide a conceptual layer above existing legacy systems. This conceptual layer is further utilized by an information reengineering framework that customizes and packages information to reflec t the unique needs of different user groups within the application domain. The architecture of the information reengineering framework is based on an object-oriented model that represents the discovered concepts as customized application objects for each distinct user group.