Context-based heterogeneous information integration system

Abstract

A system and method are provided that overcome the previously described limitations of prior art systems. The computer system, in fact, uses a set of information objects to interface with heterogeneous information sources. Information objects can be combined to form tasks that can be added, deleted and modified without requiring any modifications to the underlying program. In addition, the computer system allows users to navigate through a task and automatically generates links to related tasks based on the contextual information in which each step in the task is performed. As a result, links to related tasks do not have to be defined ahead of time, but rather can be dynamically generated at run time. This is accomplished by associating a semantic type or multiple semantic types with the information generated during each step. This allows the system to present links to tasks that utilize the same semantic types generated during the previous step. Thus, if a new task that operates on a given semantic type is created, links to that task are automatically generated during processing of related tasks without requiring any modifications to the underlying program. Semantic types, therefore, allow the system to capture, convert and integrate multiple heterogeneous data sources that contain data pertaining to the same entity. Furthermore, a graphical editor is provided that allows tasks to be easily added, deleted or modified to adapt to changing business processes without requiring new code to be written.