The Asilomar Report on Database Research

TL;DR

The paper advocates for broadening database research to include all online data, emphasizing new evaluation methods, and fostering long-term, speculative work to adapt to technological shifts and the Web's content explosion.

Contribution

It proposes a new, expanded research agenda for database community, emphasizing Web data, rethinking evaluation, and promoting open, long-range research dissemination.

Findings

Call for broader research focus on Web and online data

Recommendation to change research evaluation and presentation methods

Encouragement of speculative, long-term research projects

Abstract

The database research community is rightly proud of success in basic research, and its remarkable record of technology transfer. Now the field needs to radically broaden its research focus to attack the issues of capturing, storing, analyzing, and presenting the vast array of online data. The database research community should embrace a broader research agenda -- broadening the definition of database management to embrace all the content of the Web and other online data stores, and rethinking our fundamental assumptions in light of technology shifts. To accelerate this transition, we recommend changing the way research results are evaluated and presented. In particular, we advocate encouraging more speculative and long-range work, moving conferences to a poster format, and publishing all research literature on the Web.