The Lowell database - Research self assessment

The database research with focus on integration of text, data, code, fusion of information from heterogeneous data sources, and information privacy, conducted at Lowell, is discussed. The object-oriented (OO) and object-relational (OR) database management systems (DBMS) showed how text and other data types can be added to a DBMS. Several goals mentioned in the Lowell meeting included the proposal to reconsider DBMS architecture to handle new data types, approximate reasoning, and treating procedures and data as co-equal. It was found that information integration research would be well served by generating a test bed and collection of integration tasks.