Data integration, on the other hand has not been nearly as sucessful. Both the complexity of the needed database system and the high cost of modifying all the programming tools to use the database have made data integration expensive. In this paper we propose a new means for data integration based on a database of fragments.
Fragments are references to portions of a file.
They have a source, type and associated attributes. The database and fragments are accessed through an object-oriented query language. This mechanism promises to provide most of the capabilities typically associated with data integration without the large costs. It allows the use of existing tools and multiple languages and can offer full support for thr software engineering process.