Expensive but useful Ontology-based EII tool

Today I attended a presentation on PiiE by Digital Harbor which seems like a great tool to build Enterprise Information Integration (EII) solutions. EII tools address the data access challenges that arise from data heterogeneity (fancy words for “lots of databases”). EII tools of course pull and combine data from multiple systems on the fly and potentially create a virtual data warehouse (without requiring ETL). What I found nice about the PiiE is that its strong integration of an ontology builder and an excellent Java-based smart client. If you’re looking for data federation based on ontologies where the end user can then drive their own queries, reports, and “smart apps” definitely check out PiiE. It’s a tad expensive but for some uses it may actually save money.