Patent ID: 8694532

Claim:
A method for managing data comprising: identifying a plurality of disparate data sources, each of the disparate data sources comprising data source information and metadata that describes the data source information; accessing the metadata from the disparate data sources; generating a listing of fields from the metadata, wherein the fields correspond to data source information fields in one or more of the disparate data sources; receiving a selection of a field from the listing of fields, thereby resulting in a selected field; creating a metadata dataset comprising one or more selected fields, and identifying one or more data sources from the disparate data sources based on the metadata dataset; for each of the one or more identified disparate data sources, generating (i) a query based on a query language of the identified disparate data source and (ii) an API request that conveys the query to the identified disparate data source, wherein generating the query is based on a user request or the metadata dataset, wherein generating the API request is based on the user request or the metadata dataset, and generating the query request and the API request comprises using the metadata dataset to correlate information requested in the user request with the data source information; submitting each of the one or more generated queries to the one or more identified disparate data sources through the API request; receiving, in response to the one or more generated queries, a data source response from the one or more identified disparate data sources; and preparing a data source response to the user request for information.