AbstractData integration systems provide a uniform query interface (UQI) to multiple, autonomous data sources [Alon Y. Halevy. Answering queries using views: A survey. The VLDB Journal, 10(4):270–294, 2001]. This paper presents the universal data model (UDM) that captures the semantically salient aspects of relational, entity-relationship, and XML data models. As a consequence, UDM — including its accompanying query language — provides a simple and elegant UQI for integrating data represented in some of the most widely adopted data models.