Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FITIn many applications, management and integration of heterogeneous data is a major challenge. The data management research group develops scalable data management solutions for small and big data in different areas (life science healthcare, industry), which integrate data from various sources and make them available for data analysis. A sophisticated meta data management approach is applied to extract meta data from various sources, to enrich those with semantic annotations and to integrate them via semi-automatic matching.
Additionally, the data integration approach is based on an incremental and interactive process. Data sources will first be filled into a data lake, retaining their original structure. The data lake provides a common access method for semi-structured data. Afterwards, step-wise data integration is performed with a focus on the demands of a particular application. We bypass the huge efforts demanded by a "global" data integration inherent in many data warehouse approaches. Instead, application-oriented integration is put into the hands of users via powerful and friendly user interfaces.