Subject: Re: IRDS and PCTE

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 3 Mar 94 09:33:23 EST

I've been reading articles on this mailing list with great interest since
 I signed on several days ago. In a way, my recent research is all built
 around metadata, from model to technology. At Rensselaer Polytechnic
 Institute, my formal and current students and I have developed something
 we call the Metadatabase for information resources management (comparable
 to IRDS) and the management of multiple database, with immediate application
 domain in manufacturing. The results have been published in a number of
 journals since 1987. A core paper can be found in the June issue of IEEE
 Transactions on Software Engineering by C.Hsu, M. Bouziane, L. Rattner, and
 L. Yee, 1991. At present, we are working on visualization using metadata
 as well as working with IBM and others to commercialize the metadatabase
 technology. A while back, some colleagues at Rensselaer and I have proposed
 to NSF to extend this approach for large -scale scientific databases, but
 didn't go thru the final selection. The interest on my part, however, remains.
    
 I guess the reason for all of the above background is that, I wonder if this
 group has some interest in metadata problems in traditional databases, and 
 how does it see the roleof database technology in large-scale files and
 (scientific) data management. For instance, how does the metadata reflector 
 see the prior initiatives by NSF on scientific databases?
I would appreciate any response that anyone on this list cares to give. 
    
 Cheng Hsu
 Decision Sciences and Engineering Systems
 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
 (518) 276-6847   fax (518) 276-8227
 [email-masked]

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From: [email-masked] (Dale Lancaster)
Date: Mon, 7 Mar 94 13:19:44 -0600

> I would appreciate any response that anyone on this list cares to give. 

Part of the original impetus to start these workshops was how to manage
very large scientific databases (not necessarily RDBMS type of stuff, but
large unstructured blobs and lots of them).  So there is a lot of interest.
There is also apparent interest in metadata from a traditional sense as well,
because many people feel that traditional RDBMS are not adequate for
maintaining relationships between data elements in a robust and highly
extensible way (yes, it can be brute forced into it, but most RDBMS managers
hate it).  So, in an indirect way, this interest is also being explored
in this group.  As to the NSF stuff, I don't personally know much about
the efforts.  In fact that is one of our priorities, to discover about
all the other groups and technologies working on this problem.  We hope
to have a WWW/Mosaic site established soon that will begin to collect
this information.

thanks for your input :-))
dml