Subject: MDDS workshop notes

From: [email-masked] (Dale Lancaster)
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 94 13:51:57 -0600

I had sent these notes out once before, but evidently our internal
mailer hosed it up when we had a mailer problem a couple weeks back.

Anway, these are my notes from the Massive Digital Data Workshop
for the Metadata subgroup.

regards,

dale

Below are some notes I took from the Massive Digitial Data Systems
Workshop held recently in Reston, VA.  This workshop was sponsored
by the Intelligence Community of the DoD and focused primarily on
issues related to access to data.  There were several sub-groups.
Many of us that were involved in the IEEE Workshop were in the
Metadata Working Group at this workshop.  Below are some notes from
that workshop.

First, it started out being much like our first workshop with the IEEE
in that there was lots of different needs and opinions.  There never
really was agreement on what metadata was/is/will be.  The net result
of the workshop was a list of "problems" that need to be addressed in
some fashion.  This was feed into the main MDDS work session that
helps the sponsors of the workshop to determine what projects
should/could be funded to help get them solved.

The first area covered was the types of uses for metadata (in hopes of
trying to figure out how to define metadata :-):

- Optimize access to data
- Manage data
- Process data
- Intrepret data
- Classify data
- Store/retrieve data
- Scalability (not sure what we meant by this in terms of usage)
- Complexity of data (relationships, users, elements, etc)

The problems that need to be solved for metadata/access to data include 
those listed below.  This list was prioritized, but I missed out on 
that part of the meeting.  Maybe Robyn Sumpter, Anne Wheeler or Carol
Hunter has the prioritized list.

- Automation of the derivation of relationships in data and metadata
- Defining a structure/method/standard for how metadata is created
	and defined (I like the MIB approach suggested by Robyn in
	the whitepaper).
- Defining an API to applications and storage (and maybe other 
	major functional areas).
- Presentation of metadata.  It was empahsized that it be based on
	how users naturally would access the data based on the
	application they are using.
- Tools for metadata creation and management
- How to evolve a metadata system (especially from legacy systems
	to state-of-the-art systems)
- Automatic generation of metadata
- Optimization (some wanted to say parallelization, but the real issue
	is how to make it fast and efficient)

In summary, it was clear that there is lots of interest in solving
major data access problems.  There is still the natural split that we
saw in our first workshop of applications and storage.  Many users are
interested in how applications use/manage metadata from a applications
perspective and then the other group of users who are interested in
how a storage system would use/manage metadata.  A Metadata Reference
Model should help clear this up and show how these two areas need to
be married.

Regards,

Dale Lancaster