Joining disparate databases provides additional relationships to enhance understanding of the enterprise's data, unless the conceptual differences in the databases defeat the attempt. The obvious approach is to utilize a single team to develop a consistent design of each database, with a consistent conceptual basis. The single team ensures a consistent conceptual basis. A formal design, such as Entity Relation diagrams combined with textual descriptions of the meanings, provides a basis for joining relations. There are difficulties with this approach. First, this process is labor intensive, with limited options for automation. Second, in order to provide consistent conceptual meanings, the team must be stable while all of the databases are re-designed. Finally, the textual conceptual meanings are still open to interpretation, so that future joins may require the services of the original team to supply definitions. An approach is needed which clearly captures the conceptual meanings independent of particular personnel and which provides a clear path to automation of substantial portions of the process.