The COIN Architecture

The COIN strategy combines the best features of loose- and tight-coupling approaches to semantic-interoperability among heterogenous systems by allowing the complexity of the system to be harnessed into small chunks, by enabling sources and receivers to remain loosely-coupled to one another, and by sustaining an infrastructure for data integration.

Users and application programs (e.g. users of Web-browsers, spreadsheets, data-warehouses) are offered transparent access to the remote information sources (e.g. on-line databases, web-sites) through a Context Mediator and gateways or wrappers to the sources. The wrappers implement a uniform access to the sources at the level of the transmission format of queries and data.