A first step towards integration independence

Two major forms of information integration, federation and materialization, continue to dominate the market, embedded in separate products, each with their strengths and weaknesses. Application developers must make difficult choices among techniques and products, choices that are hard to change later. We propose a new design principle, Integration Independence, for integration engines. Integration independence frees the application designer from deciding how to integrate data. We then describe a new, adaptive information integration engine that provides the ability to index base data or to materialize transformed data, giving us a flexible platform for experimentation.