Evolution of data management

Society has made great strides in capturing, storing, managing, analyzing, and visualizing data. These tasks are generically called data management, and this article sketches its evolution through six distinct phases. The author describes the data management challenges that remain, both technical and societal. The technical challenges are more tractable than the societal challenges. There is little question that most data will be online-because it is both inexpensive and convenient to store it in computers. Organizing these huge data archives so that people can easily find the information they need is the real challenge. Finding patterns, trends, anomalies, and relevant information from a large database is one of the most exciting new areas of data management. The hope is that computers will be able to condense and summarize information for us so that we will be spared the drudgery of searching through irrelevant data for the nuggets we seek. The solution to this will require contributions from many disciplines.