Abstract:

Organisational integration covers a considerable number of aspects. Organisations are different, they consist of scattered units, curry out different processes, use various systems, operate in multi-cultural environment, cooperate with business partners which also requires integration to some extent. As a result, different processes are supported by heterogeneous systems and applications which makes gathering, processing and accessing data and information in an unified form a complex task. So, elaboration of integrating solutions for various aspects of organisational activities, including data and information level, seems to be one of significant research issue.

In this paper organisational integrating solutions on data level are discussed. Areas, where data integration is necessary are identified, different approaches are described, compared and characterised, a considerable number of ideas are presented. Because one of important elements of integrating solutions is how data are delivered to users, the system enabling to create pre-defined as well as ad hoc queries and the process of its designing is proposed. The system consists of four levels and its core is based on co-shared ontology which stores metadata about data and information gathered by individual, autonomous systems constituting integrating solution.

Problems described in this paper appear in a considerable number of data integrating approaches, so discussed solutions may be applied in various systems to resolve problems arising during elaboration of almost any information resources integrating system.