From Databases to Dataspaces: A New Abstraction for Information Management

The development of relational database management systems served to focus the data management community for decades, with spectacular results. In recent years, however, the rapidly-expanding demands of "data everywhere" have led to a field comprised of interesting and productive efforts, but without a central focus or coordinated agenda. The most acute information management challenges today stem from organizations (e.g., enterprises, government agencies, libraries, "smart" homes) relying on a large number of diverse, interrelated data sources, but having no way to manage their dataspaces in a convenient, integrated, or principled fashion. This paper proposes dataspaces and their support systems as a new agenda for data management. This agenda encompasses much of the work going on in data management today, while posing additional research objectives.