Data integration

Combining data from different sources and providing a unified view

Data integration involves combining data residing in different sources and providing users with a unified view of them. This process becomes significant in a variety of situations, which include both commercial and scientific domains. Data integration appears with increasing frequency as the volume, complexity and the need to share existing data explodes. It has become the focus of extensive theoretical work, and numerous open problems remain unsolved. Data integration encourages collaboration between internal as well as external users. The data being integrated must be received from a heterogeneous database system and transformed to a single coherent data store that provides synchronous data across a network of files for clients. A common use of data integration is in data mining when analyzing and extracting information from existing databases that can be useful for Business information.

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