Compatibility with the CRM Utility of CRM compatibility

The Information Integration Environment

The notion of CRM compatibility is based on interoperability. Interoperability is best defined on the basis of specific communication practices between information systems. Following current practice, we distinguish the following types of information integration environments pertaining to information systems:

1. 
   Local information systems. These are either collection management systems or content management systems that constitute institutional memories and are maintained by an institution. They are used for primary data entry, i.e. a relevant part of the information, be it data or metadata, is primary information in digital form that fulfils institutional needs.
   

2. 
   Integrated access systems. These provide an homogeneous access layer to multiple local systems. The information they manage resides primarily on local systems. We distinguish between:
   
   1. 
      Materialized access systems, which physically import data provided by local systems, using a data warehouse approach. Such systems may employ so-called metadata harvesting techniques or rely on data submission. Data may be transformed to respect the schema of the access system before being merged.
      
   2. 
      Mediation systems, [Gio Wiederholt] which send out queries, formulated according to a virtual global schema, to multiple local systems and then collect and integrate the answers. The queries may be transformed to a local schema either by the mediation system or by the receiving local system itself.
      

Local systems may also import data from other systems, in order to complement collections, or to merge information from other systems. An information system may export information for migration and preservation.

1. 
   data falling within the scope of the CRM can be exported from an information system into an encoded form without loss of meaning with respect to CRM concepts;
   
2. 
   data falling within the scope of the CRM can be transformed into another encoded form without loss of meaning with respect to CRM concepts;
   
3. 
   data falling within the scope of the CRM can be imported from an encoded form into an information system without loss of meaning with respect to CRM concepts;
   
4. 
   data falling within the scope of the CRM that is contained in an information system can be queried and retrieved exhaustively in terms of CRM concepts, subject to the expressive power of a particular query language.
   

Any declaration of CRM compatibility must specify one or more of the above use cases. System and data structure providers shall not declare their products as “CRM compatible” without specifying the appropriate use cases as detailed below.