Patent ID: 8108338

Claim:
A computer program product comprising a tangible computer-readable storage medium having computer-readable program code for replicating data in a system having a data tier with a plurality of data sources and an application tier with a plurality of applications, said computer program product including: computer-readable program code for creating an instance of an information model of the data specified by a schema, said model being created in a form suitable for manipulation by at least one of the applications of the application tier and forming at least a portion of a model tier intermediate the data tier and the application tier, said model tier comprising a virtual store interface through which said at least one of the applications accesses said instance; computer-readable program code for creating a replica of said instance of said information model in a form suitable for remote transmission; and computer-readable program code for obtaining a consistency policy that specifies a level of consistency required between said instance of said information model and said replica; wherein said data tier comprises: a store layer comprising said plurality of data sources; and an aggregation layer intermediate said store layer and said model tier, said aggregation layer comprising a plurality of unified store model interfaces corresponding to respective ones of said plurality of data sources; wherein said store layer comprises a plurality of store-specific information models; wherein said aggregation layer comprises an elementary information model; and wherein said model tier comprises a self-describing high-level information model.