Social Interaction in Databases - Community-Built Databases: Research and Development - page 160

viewpoint that organizes the data is given to the users, who are usually unable to
change it.
In many cases, access to data is done through views , that is, the result of
relational queries that display a selected part of the data for a given user or set of
users. While views allow a certain degree of customization, full access to data is
complicated by the fact that changes to views actually amount to changes to the
database tables (since views do not have an existence of their own), and technical
issues prevent many updates from being possible in relational views. As a result,
databases accept very little in the way of user input.
Hence, user-created content is currently being ignored in databases. In this
chapter, we argue that database technology should and can be adapted to provide
the needed capabilities to support user interaction, user communities, and the
social dynamics that arise from them :
l Database technology should be used to support user interaction because data-
bases tend to have communities of users (i.e., not a single or small group), so
they are a perfect environment to enable social interaction . Furthermore, there
are several ways in which database systems can benefit from user-created
content: it can help interpret the data in the database, enrich it, and fill in any
gaps in (very needed, but hardly present) metadata. Also, by allowing users to
store their own data in the database, we make them more likely to explore the
data and, in general, use the database for their tasks.
l Database technology can be used to support user interaction because the rela-
tional data model can be seen as a general platform on top of which flexible
schemas can be developed so that almost arbitrary content can be captured and
stored.
There are clear benefits of adapting existing database technology for this end
(as opposed to creating brand new approaches), including:
l Reusing existing data repositories. Such repositories may provide a starting
point for user communities to gather around
l Reusing database technology to securely and efficiently store large amounts of
user-created data
l Allowing a smooth transition from traditional repositories of information to
user-created content. This continuity should be an important point for many
organizations which may not want to throw away years of information
In this chapter, we overview the challenges to such goals posed by current
relational technology and offer an initial set of solutions. In order to make the
chapter self-contained, in the next section we introduce some basic definitions and
establish some terminology. Next, in Sect. 7.3 , we describe with some examples the
kind of social interaction that we aim to support and show how in each case the
interaction is not supported or ill-supported by current relational technology. Then
in Sect. 7.4 , we describe our general framework to enable social interaction in databases
and show how capturing user-created data and metadata plays a fundamental role.
Hence, in Sect. 7.5 , we offer some initial solutions to the problems exposed in