The size and complexity of today's databases demand more attention toward searching, interpreting and managing them. These activities require richer machine processing of descriptions of that data, that is, of meta-data. This talk explores meta-data management through a retrospective on the database field, exploring the current usage and future requirements of meta-data technology in different kinds of databases in common use today -- in particular, classical databases for data processing, database usage of packaged applications, data warehousing, groupware databases, Internet document databases, data mining, and object-relational databases. Looking at these areas, we see the broad range and great importance of meta-data problems, such as meta-data integration, transformation analysis and generation, and meta-data evolution. These can only be solved by a concentrated effort on general-purpose meta-data management technology, which the database field is just beginning to wake up to. We present a conceptual framework for understanding meta-data management components, and summarize our own recent work on meta-data technology in Microsoft Repository. We close with a discussion of major open database problems that require new approaches meta-data management.
Philip A. Bernstein is a Senior Researcher in the database group of Microsoft Research and a contributor to the Microsoft Repository product group, where he was Architect from 1994-1998. He has published over 90 articles and 3 books on database systems and related topics, and has contributed to many database system products, prototypes, and standards. His latest book is "Principles of Transaction Processing" (Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1996). He received his Ph.D. from University of Toronto in 1975.