In the last few years the number of datasources (traditional database systems, data feeds, and applications providing structured or semi-structured data) has increased dramatically. This is has been spurred on by various factors. For example, ease of access to the Internet (which is emerging as the de facto global information infrastructure) and the rise of new organizational forms (e.g. adhoracies and networked organizations) which mandate new ways of sharing and managing information. Users of these sources expect each system to understand requests stated in their own terms, using their own concepts of how the world is structured.

The COIN project seeks to address this problem by consolidating distributed datasources and providing a unified view to them. COIN technology presents all datasources as SQL databases by providing generic wrappers for them. The COIN model also defines a novel approach for integrating these disparate datasources by providing logical connectivity (the ability to exchange data meaningfully) among them.

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