Metaintegration

Metaintegration is a concept used in information systems, data management, and organizational design to describe the coordination and synthesis of integration efforts across multiple heterogeneous systems, data sources, and disciplinary domains by operating at a higher, meta level. It aims to align governance, standards, models, and workflows so that individual integration projects can interoperate and reinforce each other rather than compete for resources or produce conflicting results. At its core are meta-models and metadata infrastructures that describe data structures, interfaces, provenance, quality metrics, and compliance requirements, enabling automated alignment and decision-making across integration activities.

Key components of metaintegration include a meta-architecture and an enterprise metadata repository, ontology alignment, and interoperability standards; governance mechanisms and a lifecycle for evaluating, adopting, and retiring integration components; and abstraction layers that coordinate diverse data flows and interfaces. By focusing on the meta level, metaintegration seeks to reduce duplication, improve consistency, and provide traceability across projects, platforms, and domains.

Common approaches encompass metadata-driven integration, ontology-based data integration, and meta-ETL or meta-ELT orchestration, where transformations and data flows are governed by higher-level models rather than being bespoke to each source. This can enable more scalable integration across evolving ecosystems and support cross-domain interoperability.

Applications of metaintegration appear in enterprise data integration, research data management, cross-organization data sharing, and the orchestration of AI model pipelines. Challenges include managing complexity, sustaining governance and funding, resolving semantic heterogeneity, ensuring data quality, and addressing security and privacy concerns. As a developing concept, metaintegration emphasizes coordination and meta-level modeling to improve the coherence of integration efforts.