1. An automatic information integration flow optimizer apparatus comprising: an input/output port configured to connect the information integration flow optimizer to extract-transform-load (ETL) tools, and to receive a tool-specific input file; a parser unit configured to parse the tool-specific input file into semantics, and to create a tool-agnostic input file containing rich semantics of at least one of datasets, implementations, schema, operators, database management systems, or ETL tools; a converter unit configured to transform the tool-agnostic input file into an input directed acyclic graph (DAG); and a quality objective (QoX) driven optimizer unit configured to apply one or more heuristic algorithms to the tool-agnostic input DAG to develop an optimum information integration flow design based on the rich semantics.