Information is the key to success and yet getting the right kind of information at the right time is a challenge for many enterprises.

A large enterprise typically has a large number of heterogeneous data sources - many legacy systems, third party applications, unstructured content, and so on, that have evolved over time to serve different needs in different contexts, with context-specific semantics and built-in assumptions. Integrating these disparate sources to get a consistent, unified view of data is a hard problem that IT departments constantly grapple with, which is only growing in complexity with ever growing data volumes.

Ad hoc, point solutions only exacerbate the problem further, as businesses are growing in complexity and there is a constant need for change. A more systematic method is called for that is better able to cope with the ever changing, heterogeneous environments of modern enterprises. That is the focus of this work.