Achievements of the Recent (5-10 years) IDM Projects & DB/IR Fields
Jianwen Su and Susan Gauch
Mission
This working group was charged with collecting information that can convey the
impact of Information Retrieval/Database/Knowledge Management research
to Congress using terms and outcomes accessible to an informed public.
One of our goals was to show the roots of commercial success in earlier,
fundamental research.
Deliverables
We produced three deliverables:
Discussion Summary
New Research Topics of the Late 1990s
We discussed research topics broken down into five categories: Database,
Information Retrieval, Multimedia, Knowledge Bases and Digital Libraries.
One of the main themes of the discussion was the increasing overlap
between the traditional fields. To present just one example of this
overlab, there was quite some debate about where "Multimedia" belonged, with
both Information Retrieval and Database researchers claiming it as an
integral hot research area in "their" field. This lead to the not
surprising conclusion that Multimedia was a research topic that spanned
across the IDM fields and, of course, into the fields of Image Processing,
Computer Vision, Mathematics and Robotics. Similarly, Digital Libraries
projects span across many fields of technology, plus bring in researchers
in library science and providers and users of the digital library's content.
Finally, the World Wide Web, particularly markup, indexing and retrieval of
semi-structured information brings the fields of database and information
retrieval together.
The following is a list of the new research topics discussed by the group,
presneted by area:
Technology Deployments of the Late 1990s
This list was primarily put together based on the knowledge of the
individuals involved in the discussion group.
Clearly, there have been many, many more technology deployments in the
Information Technology field whose origins can be traced back to
earlier fundamental research. The most obvious technology deployments whose
origins can be traced back to NSF are those deployed on the World Wide Web.
It is hard to underestimate the impact the Web is having on how business
is conducted and how individuals interact on society. Many of the Web
technologies have their origins in IR/DB work of the last two decades.
Potentially even more important, the Human Genome project is an
example of a huge, collaborative digital library that has the potential to
radically change the quality of life and health on the planet.
Again, we broke the technology deployments into the five categories as the
research topics.
It is interesting to consider the current boom in e-commerce. Most, if not
all, e-commerce site are based on databases to track product, orders, and
customers. They rely on network protocols to exchange data. They
are trusted because of fundamental work in authentication and
encryption. They are accessible to users due to the development of
http and HTML, an outgrowth of research in Hypertext. None of this would
be possible without decades of research in seemingly disparate fields coming
together into an effective, reliable, efficient and user-friendly
environment for online business.
Success Stories
We were able to identify several successful, well-known, commercial products
who can clearly trace their origins back to NSF-sponsored research.
These were:
Diagrams Showing the Research Roots of Commercially Successful Products