Patent ID: 7885983

Claim:
A computer readable medium, comprising executable instructions to: define an individual publication schema for each heterogeneous source of a plurality of heterogeneous sources, wherein each individual publication schema specifies mapping rules between data from a heterogeneous source and a non-permanent structured instance of data; generate individual non-permanent structured instances of data as defined by the individual publication schemas, wherein each individual non-permanent structured instance of data is a publication view expressed as a query; establish an integration schema defining a set of integration rules for combining data from each non-permanent structured instance of data as defined by the individual publication schemas, wherein the integration schema produces a source view with different publication views based on a target schema, wherein the source view includes hidden attributes representing source attributes omitted in the target schema but used to calculate attributes of the target schema and to analyze conflicts between individual publication schemas; form a target non-permanent structured instance of data to include data from the plurality of heterogeneous sources based on at least one integration schema; and incrementally modify the non-permanent structured instance of data as defined by a publication schema in response to a new source table.