Field of research: Data interoperability, meaning all data management activities involved in connecting and integrating systems, like data exchange, conversion, synchronization, integration, cleaning, evolution and migration, especially in the context of problems like structural heterogeneity, data conflicts, semantic duplicates, incompleteness, inexactness, unknown (in)dependencies, and ambiguousness.
There exists some tool support, but a major portion of the IT-budget and manpower is necessarily still devoted to these data management activities. In the trend towards the creation of massive dataspaces in an ever more connected world, data interoperability increasingly becomes an insurmo...