Patent ID: 7962512

Claim:
A federated system comprising: a plurality of data sources, at least two data sources of the plurality of data sources comprising content; and one or more nodes, one or more of the plurality of data sources being defined on the at least one node, the at least one node further comprising one or more mappings between the content from the at least two data sources, wherein the content is obtained from the at least two data sources and merged using the one or more mappings, and the merged content from the at least two data sources are provided to one or more clients, wherein the one or more mappings between the content from the at least two data sources is created at least in part by: normalizing the content from the at least two data sources; comparing values of same object type from the at least two data sources; and creating one or more mappings between matching values of the same object type from the at least two data sources.