A few weeks ago, I had an interesting conversation with Paolo on why web 2.0 tools are still struggling to find their way in the academic world. Back in September last year I attended the panel What Web 2.0 Has To Do With Databases?, which investigated the reasons why the database community has left behind in the research in the field of web 2.0.

Following Paolo’ suggestion, I post the notes I took at the time. Having clear in mind that the two topics are different, I think they are somehow correlated, because those people that consider blogs, wiki, etc., a “waste of time” are also the ones that are missing the opportunity in doing research in such an interesting field.
***
Panellists:

• Sihem Amer-Yahia (Yahoo!)
• Alon Halevy (Google)
• AnHai Doan (University of Wisconsin)
• Gerhard Weikum (Max-Planck Institute for Informatics, Germany)
• Gustavo Alonso (ETH, Zurich)

Abstract can be found here.
Here is Alon Halevy’s post on the panel: read, in particular these two comments (1, 2) which, in my opinion, summarise quite well the situation.
***
PROBLEM
Is the database community ready to accept the new challenges that are coming from the Web 2.0 world? The risk of “missing the train” is very high, considering that the commercial interest on these technologies is leaving academic research behind.

INTRODUCTION

• Web 2.0 is about people, unstructured data, imprecise queries, information retrieval.
• Web 2.0 is not about structure and quality.

Unstructured data and applications are pervasive, they are everywhere and companies greatly exploit them, but:

• A “holistic approach” is lacking (all current solutions are ad-hoc solutions)
• The “structured methodology”, typical of the database community, should be brought into the Web 2.0.

WEB 2.0 IS FASHION, DBMS’ RULE
Database people were not fully convinced by Web 2.0 and the two worlds seemed quite distant. In general, they do not believe that databases as we know them (their structure, methodologies, best practices, etc.) will ever lose their cenrtrality in any information management application. Even web 2.0 is only a “cool application” that will eventually be substituted by something else, whereas databases will still be in place.

This is quite a conservative point of view and even those who say that “traditional DBMS’ are dead” (Michel Stonebraker among others, but he’s not the only one) seem, in practice, to be a bit sceptical about the loss of centrality of the databases.

SCHEMA INTEGRATION FAILED, WEB 2.0 MIGHT BE THE ALTERNATIVE
Everybody seemed to agree that tight schema integration is a buzz word that does not work in the real world, and this despite the fact that it has been studied for several years both in the industry and in the academia.

Web 2.0 seems the good compromise to have “real” integration, though this happens at the data level (and should probably be called “data reconciliation” instead). From the schema point of view, someone argued a real integration is not possible because there are no strong stakeholders demanding for it (these will not be neither the people on the street nor Google or Yahoo).

Google pushes forward the concept of a dataspace (btw, Halevy’s dataspace) that includes all users’ data. The physical system is left in the background, almost a legacy from the past: data matters, databases are needed for storage, reliability, etc. (are we talking about cloud computing?).

OTHER COMMENTS
Someone’s comment: companies are keen of groups that do research on Web 2.0 and even encourage them to do it. However, Web 2.0 is about people and data: if the big companies do not release the data they have, how can the DB community research on it (and what should they analyse?)?

***
SUMMARY
The two worlds seemed very distant and the main reason probably relies in the different backgrounds: database are structure, metodology and algorithms. Web 2.0 is based on randomness (well, some form of), no predefined schema and, among all, unpredictable social interactions that are kept away from databases. It is no surprise that the communication between the two is particularly difficult.