At the other end we encounter the critical data management needs of scientists involved in the process of scientific discovery whose primary need is functionality and extensibility of systems. The group recommends that IDM be cognizant that to develop large-scale, comprehensive systems requires funding significantly above the current average IDM individual grant level. The typical digital library paradigm tends to describe static and passive repositories of data. Systems should improve the automation of these time-consuming tasks. The realization of a system can only be successful if it is based on a solid framework derived from a careful requirement analysis and performance considerations.
New applications require combining multiple query and retrieval paradigms.
Current query planning and optimization technology typically focuses on a single paradigm. The challenge is to develop extensible planners, optimizers and cost models that can handle multiple paradigms. Accessing and retrieval can be content based, keyword based, category based or others. In this regard, we need to define expressive and efficient query and update languages as well as fast data access techniques, and build user interfaces with data visualization which can be used by a wide class of people, rather than domain specialists only. A major support issue is whether to support at the client or at the text server end.