Michael Lang, CEO presents, "The Next Forty Years" at Semtech East, Washington D.C.

Abstract: We are at an inflection point where the confines of existing data management practices are being exchanged for a more flexible, extensible platform.  Over the next forty years, data will evolve from siloed schemas and become completely distributed, machine readable, and useable without complex mapping and coding.   

In existing Information Management Systems, data is stored in databanks with rigid schemas.  While these data stores are shared to some degree, wider use of the data is accomplished by replicating the data in data warehouses and specialized data marts.  The data and metadata are different types of things.  Query processors only understand their local data, expressed in a fixed schema.  While providing reliable  ACID / CRUD capability, there is little or no robust analytic capability.

The information management technology for the next forty years is keyed off precise, formalized descriptions of the schema, data, mappings, rules, location, logic and the relations between schemas. 

Distributed Information Management Systems (DIMS) assume constant change and provide the extensibility to cope with evolving demands.  In a Distributed Information Management System, the data, metadata and logic are all in one place. With rich, formalized descriptive standards, the data are easily shared.  

The DIMS paradigm assumes data is completely distributed, and that any person or any machine should be able to find it and use it without complex coding and mapping. The metadata data and data instances are machine readable.  DIMS is based on W3C standards: RDF is the data model, OWL is the schema model, and SPARQL is the query language. 

Data will be distributed and federated, providing a robust platform for reasoning, inferencing, and an Emergent Analytic capability.