1. Jim Gray Microsoft Research
Data Management for Frontiers at the Interface Between Computing and Biology
Jim Gray
Microsoft Research

2. Cosmic Questions Where are we today? Where in 5 years?
What are the key questions?
What am I doing next?
What are the barriers?
What hinders collaboration?
What changes needed in education?

3. How much information is there?
Yotta
Zetta
Exa
Peta
Tera
Giga
Mega
Kilo
Everything!
Recorded
Soon everything can be recorded and indexed
Most bytes will never be seen by humans.
Human attention is the precious resource.
Automatic: Capture, store, organize, analyze, summarize
Manual visualize/iterate
All Books MultiMedia
All LoC books
(words)
.Movie
A Photo
A Book
24 Yecto, 21 zepto, 18 atto, 15 femto, 12 pico, 9 nano, 6 micro, 3 milli

4. Plumbing Everything can be online Storage is nearing 1 K$/TeraByte,
Networking is 1$ / delivered GB
Software is cheap or free
Systems are becoming self-managing

5. Data Management Systems
Can ingest/store/search/analyze Tera Bytes
Numbers
Text
Some progress on “objects”
But semantics have to come from the domain
Good science and engineering, but… Flopped in marketplace.

6. Basic Problems Data Acquisition: Data Ingest:
I do not much to say here
Data Ingest:
This is a huge problem
Data Organization & Access
This is what databases are good at for text & numbers
For “semantic” data it requires domain –specific tools.
Data Publication/ Discovery/ Interchange
Requires good standards
We have syntactic standards, Semantic standards are needed.

7. My #1 Problem Data Interchange (includes publication and discovery)
What does the data mean?
The answer is: 42.
Units?
Precision? Accuracy?
How was the number derived?
How can you tell me what it means (without us talking on the phone or you visiting my laboratory)
Need standard terminology, and standard formats.
Hard to do for “new” stuff.

8. Great Hope & Promise XML is the answer
Reality: XML is one layer up from Unicode.
Can describe structured information
But not process, not meaning, not…
Answer #2: Objects
SOAP, Web Services,…
Probably a better answer
But… still needs tools to make it workable.

9. Discussion

10. Gifford’s List Data Interchange Scale: whats big
Quality: how do you keep it up
DBs need more semantics.