The UNICOM Intelligence Data Model acts as a data access framework that sits between applications and data stored in various formats or database schemas. You can consider the UNICOM Intelligence Data Model to be an interpreting or translation service that enables an application to understand the data. This capacity of the UNICOM Intelligence Data Model, together with its open architecture, removes the data storage and access restrictions of older, proprietary architectures.

In the past, market research software often stored survey data in nonstandard formats making it difficult to share data between different families of data collection and analysis tools. The UNICOM Intelligence Data Model takes advantage of industry-standard, open technologies, so that you can collect and process data using any conventional application, such as Microsoft Excel. The UNICOM Intelligence Data Model allows you to work with the data independently of the underlying storage format. This means that you are no longer tied to any one product when accessing data and products are no longer tied to one particular data storage format. This gives you greater flexibility and improved workflow.

Market research data poses challenges that contribute to the use of nonstandard data formats. Most market research data contains responses collected using categorical questions that have a predefined list of responses or categories. An example is the question What do you remember seeing in the museum today? Respondents answer by selecting items from a list of responses. This type of data is hard to represent and analyze using conventional tools. However, the UNICOM Intelligence Data Model supports the categorical variable type, and using the UNICOM Intelligence Data Model you can run structured query language (SQL) queries on categorical data. SQL (not to be confused with SQL Server) is a standard international language for defining and accessing data. The UNICOM Intelligence Data Model supports a subset of the SQL language natively and has built in an expression evaluation component, a library of functions, a number of SQL syntax extensions, and a scriptable programming language that have all been designed specifically to meet the needs of the market research industry.