Patent US 7,103,593

A system and method are provided for retrieving and integrating disparate, heterogeneous information such as structured data, unstructured text, and images from different information sources in real-time. The system includes a plurality of client applications a model agent and a plurality of integration agents. Queries are written in terms of the classes, attributes, and relationships of the domain model as provided by the model agent. These queries for information are sent from a requesting client application to an appropriate integration agent based upon the data source it is responsible for. If the requested information is split among a plurality of integration agents that are each tied to a data source, the agent will broker the query by sending sub-queries to those agents directly, perform transformations on the data to match the model, and combine the information together for transmission to the requester. In this fashion, each integration agent can act as a broker and thus no centralized brokering system is required.