The Life and Death of Unwanted Bits: Towards Proactive Waste Data Management in Digital Ecosystems

TL;DR

This paper draws parallels between physical waste management and digital data management, proposing a waste hierarchy and strategies to identify, categorize, and reuse unwanted data to improve system performance and reduce costs.

Contribution

It introduces a waste hierarchy for digital objects and offers novel methods for reusing, reducing, and recycling data to mitigate digital waste.

Findings

Waste data degrades system performance and increases costs

A digital waste hierarchy helps categorize and manage unwanted data

Reusing and recycling data can reduce digital pollution

Abstract

Our everyday data processing activities create massive amounts of data. Like physical waste and trash, unwanted and unused data also pollutes the digital environment by degrading the performance and capacity of storage systems and requiring costly disposal. In this paper, we propose using the lessons from real life waste management in handling waste data. We show the impact of waste data on the performance and operational costs of our computing systems. To allow better waste data management, we define a waste hierarchy for digital objects and provide insights into how to identify and categorize waste data. Finally, we introduce novel ways of reusing, reducing, and recycling data and software to minimize the impact of data wastage