What are the benefits? Personalized and real-time configurable views of an integrated heterogeneous data environment (relational databases, XML documents, object-oriented databases, frame-based knowledge bases, multimedia, etc.) Users and applications focus on asking the right questions because ADINA insulates them from underlying data source schemas, ontologies, query languages, interrelationships, and terminology. Access language is closer to natural language, making the queries easier to express by application programmers. Data sources remain autonomous because they just "describe" themselves to ADINA. They do not need to conform to metadata standards or provide software wrappers. Loose coupling between users and data. When data source structures change, the applications still work. Scalability - diverse sources can be integrated and modified with ease.