Patent ID: 8234294

Claim:
A method using one or more computer systems for querying data relating to an industry having a plurality of industry business context dimensions which define logical groupings of data related to the industry, the data contained in a plurality of data sources, at least one data source having a physical or logical structure differing from at least one other data source, each data source having data which is capable of a logical contextual grouping into at least one data source specific dimension which contains data related to at least one industry business context dimension, each data source having a data access mechanism for facilitating querying thereof, the data sources being part of a system for unifying the data, the system having a plurality of data source query function calls, each query function call querying a single data source regarding a single data source specific dimension, each dimension having at least one dimension instance, the method comprising the steps of: receiving from a user the identity of a dimension to be queried; providing to the user a plurality of data source query function calls from which the user may select at least one data source query function call; creating a result set having columns defined by the data source query functions selected by the user; receiving from a user the identity of at least one dimension instance to perform a query regarding; and populating the columns of the result set with data retrieved from the query.