ACM Queue - Why Your Data Won't Mix - New tools and techniques can help ease the pain of reconciling schemas.

ACM Queue - Why Your Data Won't Mix - New tools and techniques can help ease the pain of reconciling schemas.

Good Article:

From a practical perspective, one of the reasons that schema heterogeneity is difficult and time-consuming is that it requires both domain and technical expertise: you need people who understand the business meaning of each of the schemas being reconciled and people skilled in writing transformations (e.g., SQL or XQuery experts).

While schema heterogeneity is challenging for humans, it is drastically more challenging for programs. A program is given only the two schemas to reconcile, but those schemas are merely symbols. They do not capture the entire meaning or intent of the schemas—those are only in the minds of the designers.