Is data naturally integrated or does it naturally exist as islands of disparate data?  Our investigated in search of the natural state of data began with our universe of data.  Our universe of data is composed from all metadata and all data from all data sources. Data models are perhaps our best  depiction of our universe of data. Within each well-developed data model, every data entity is connected by entity relationships to other data entities.  No data entity or cluster of data entities is isolated or partitioned from any other cluster of data entities.  There are no islands of disparate data represented within a single data model and there is no sign of data isolation.   

While we have certainly developed islands of disparate data within our data architectures, data integration methods may be applied to integrate this isolated data. Since any island of disparate data may be resolved by current data integration methods, one could therefore conclude that our universe of data should be integrated.  That is to say that the natural state of data is to be integrated.

So why is data isolation so prevalent in our data architectures?  We have discovered
that these islands of disparate data are an unintended artifact of our currently flawed data modeling methodology that ignores the interactions between data  models.  With current data modeling methodologies, data models are developed independently and composed from heterogeneous metadata.  The lack of metadata commonality and the lack of links between data models result in metadata and data isolation.  Since each database is normally developed from a single data model, the resulting database is just as isolated as the original data models.

Our new Data Reintegration Methodology corrects the database design flaws and eliminates the data isolation that was instantiated into our databases. Our data models now support relationships between data models. This is another first in the industry! These inter-data model entity relationships are named commonality relationships.  Commonality relationships, when properly instantiated, supports referential integrity between databases.  Within the Data Reintegration data architecture, each data model becomes a part of a distributed network on integrated data models.  When databases are instantiated from these data models, each database becomes a part of a single distributed network of integrated databases. 

You are invited to leave comments on this blog.  For more detailed information, 
contact us and request the Data Reintegration Methodology whitepaper.

Data Reintegration is a trademark of Strategic  Insights Inc. 
The Data Reintegration Methodology is patented by U.S. patent no. 7,979,475 and other pending patents. 
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