In computer science the INtelligent Data Understanding System is a project of the University of Iowa Computer Science Department.
INDUS is a federated, query-centric system for metadata discovery from distributed, semantically heterogeneous data.
INDUS employs ontologies and inter-ontology mappings, to enable a user or an application to view a collection of physically distributed, autonomous, semantically heterogeneous data sources (regardless of location, internal structure and query interfaces) as though they were a collection of tables structured according to an ontology supplied by the user. This allows INDUS to answer user queries against distributed, semantically heterogeneous data sources without the need for a centralized data warehouse or a common global ontology.