Patent ID: 7464087
Filing Date: 2008-12-09
Classification: G06F,Y10S

Abstract:
1. A system for unifying data relating to an industry having a plurality of industry business context dimensions which define logical groupings of data related to the industry, the system comprising: one or more computer systems, comprising: a plurality of data sources, at least one-two data sources having a physical or logical structure differing from at least one other data source, each data source having data which is capable of a logical contextual grouping into at least one data source specific dimension which contains data related to at least one industry business context dimension, and each data source having a data access mechanism for facilitating querying thereof, wherein each dimension has at least one dimension instance and each of the at least two data sources have data relating to a dimension instance; a database having a first and a second plurality of nodes, each of the first plurality of nodes representing an industry business context dimension, each of the second plurality of nodes representing a data source specific dimension of at least one of the data sources, each of the first plurality of nodes related to at least one other of the first plurality of nodes, and each of the second plurality of nodes related to at least one of the first plurality of nodes, wherein the database is stored in at least one of the data sources; a plurality of data source query function calls, each query function call querying a single data source regarding a single data source specific dimension, and each query function call using the data access mechanism of the single data source to facilitate access to the single data source; and a complex query comprising a plurality of data source query function calls, the complex query querying the at least two data sources for data relating to the dimension instance, the complex query calling the plurality of data source query function calls to perform the querying of the at least two data sources for the data relating to the dimension instance, and wherein the data relating to the dimension instance is retrieved from each of the at least two data sources.