Integration Through a Practitioner's Eye

Publications in the area of data integration address severa l important data model, query processing, and data semantics issues. This paper presents integration from a pr actitioner's perspective - those practical pain points that are not discussed in typical research literature, but b ig enough to warrant careful study in order to realize practically useful integration systems. The paper discuss es several challenges that arise in real-life integration scenarios, some techniques for addressing them, and identifies several key areas that require further study. This paper is based on our experiences with building Tavant InterConnect, the crucial integration component of the Tavant Solutions Framework (NST01). In Section 2, we set the stage for our discussions by providing an overview of the Tavant solution with special emphasis on its integration component. In Section 3, we discuss the nature of integrated data in practice and issues related to i ts representation. We discuss the use and manipulation of integrated data in Section 4, present several practical c hallenges that arise in real-life integration in Section 5, and finally conclude in Section 6.