Data integration involves combining
data residing in different sources and providing users with a unified view of these data.
This process becomes significant in a variety of situations, which include both commercial (when two similar companies need to merge their
databases) and scientific (combining research results from different
bioinformatics repositories, for example) domains. Data integration appears with increasing frequency as the volume and the need to share existing data
explodes. It has become the focus of extensive theoretical work, and numerous open problems remain unsolved. In
management circles, people frequently refer to data integration as "
Enterprise Information Integration" (EII).