Panel: Is Generic Metadata Management Feasible?

The database field has worked on metadata-related problems for 30 years. Examples include data translation and migration, schema evolution, database design, schema / ontology integration, XML wrapper generation, data scrubbing and transformation for data warehouses, message mapping for e-business, and schema-driven web site design. Tools that address these problems are strikingly similar in their design. Arguably, we are making very little progress, since we keep reapplying the same old 1970’s techniques of data translation [9] and views to one new problem after another, without getting much leverage from each succeeding step. Despite all the research on the above tools, we have so far been unable to offer generalpurpose database technology that factors out the similar aspects of these tools into generic database infrastructure.