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Abstract:
The WWW has made information update fast and easy, and (through search engines
such as Google) retrieval fast and easy.
The emerging GRIDs architecture offers the end-user complete solutions to
their simple request involving data and information, computation and procesing,
display and distribution. By comparison conventional database systems and
their user interfaces appear clumsy and difficult. Nonetheless, experience
with WWW has taught us that fast and easy can also equate with information
that is inaccurate, imprecise, incomplete and irrelevant. To overcome these
problems there is intensive research on 'the semantic web' and 'the web of
trust'. The GRIDs environment is being developed to include Computer Science
fundamentals in handling data, information and knowledge. The key aspects
are representativity of the data and information - accuracy, precision, structure
(syntax), meaning (semantics) - and expressivity of the languages to represent
and manipulate the data, information and knowledge - syntax, semantics. There
are related issues of security and trust, of heterogeneity and distribution
and of scheduling and performance. The key architectural components are metadata,
agents and brokers. Access to the GRIDs environment will be from ambient computing
clients; this raises a host of new problems in security and performance and
in information summarisation and presentation. There remains an exciting active
research agenda for database technology.