From the website:
OpenII is a collaborative effort spearheaded by The MITRE Corporation and Google to create a suite of open-source tools for information integration. The project is leveraging the latest developments in research on information integration to create a platform on which integration applications can be built and further research can be conducted.
The motivation for OpenII is that although a significant amount of research has been conducted on information integration, and several commercial systems have been deployed, many information integration applications are still hard to build. In research, we often innovate on a specific aspect of information integration, but then spend much our time building (and rebuilding) other components that we need in order to validate our contributions. As a result, the research prototypes that have been built are generally not reusable and do not inter-operate with each other. On the applications side, information integration comes in many flavors, and therefore it is hard for commercial products to serve all the needs. Our goal is to create tools that can be applied in a variety of architectural contexts and can easily be tailored to the needs of particular domains.
OpenII tools include, among others, wrappers for common data sources, tools for creating matches and mappings between disparate schemas, a tool for searching collections of schemas and extending schemas, and run-time tools for processing queries over heterogeneous data sources.
The M3 metamodel:
The fundamental building block in M3 is the entity. An entity represents information about a set of related real-world objects. Associated with each entity is a set of attributes that indicate what information is captured about each entity. For simplicity, we assume that at most one value can be associated with each attribute of an entity.
The project could benefit from a strong injection of subject identity based thinking and design.