The Clio Project is a collaboration between University of Toronto and the IBM Almaden Research Center to build tools to simplify conversion from one data format to another, or in the words of the project “…Clio can automatically generate either a view, to reformulate queries against one schema into queries on another for data integration, or code, to transform data from one representation to the other for data exchange.”
The text with some screen shots at IBM says:
The Schema Viewer allows users to draw arrows between source and target schema elements. Such arrows may cross nesting levels, combine multiple elements, split and merge tables, etc. Clio incrementally interprets these arrows as mappings and generates a query accordingly.
Is that the same as Bernard Vatant’s ontological emptiness? That is all we know is that the user drew an arrow from one schema element to another?
The project has produced a number of papers but no software that is openly available. I will request a copy and report back.