10. A method for automatically optimizing an information integration flow, the method comprising the steps of: receiving a tool-specific input file representing a physical information integration flow; parsing the tool-specific input file to identify semantics of the physical information integration flow; creating a tool-agnostic input file containing rich semantics of at least one of datasets, implementations, schema, operators, database management systems, or ETL tools; transforming the tool-agnostic input file into an input directed acyclic graph (DAG); providing the input DAG to a quality objective (QoX) driven optimizer unit; and applying one or more heuristic algorithms to the input DAG to develop an optimum information integration flow design based on the rich semantics.
16. The method of claim 10 , further including the step of choosing among one or more specific execution instances related to a dataset to be processed by the physical information integration flow.