Social Interaction in Databases - Community-Built Databases: Research and Development - page 180

7.8 Conclusion and Further Research
We have presented a general framework for enabling social interaction in data-
bases. The overall goal is to increase the flow of information among users. As part
of this project, it is necessary to find ways to allow users to add their own content to
the database. In this chapter, we have argued that this technology currently does not
support the required functionality. We then proposed extensions to the technology
that offer the basic support needed. Our extensions are conservative, that is, they
work within the relational database model, since this maximizes the chances of the
approach being implemented in current software. At the same time, our extensions
allow users to enter several forms of content (tags, comments, structured data) in a
format that is convenient to the user.
The ideas proposed here can be extended in several ways. From a technical point
of view, there are some extensions that should be considered to make the frame-
work complete. For instance, we stated that most of our analysis is static, but there
are clearly some concepts that could (and should) be extended to a dynamic
viewpoint. As database usage evolves over time, the dynamic view of user content
should become valuable. Such analysis is already carried out in social Web sites [ 3 ].
Also, we do not deal with nulls. However, it could be very interesting to see what
users say about null values, and whether their input helps deal with the difficult
issues surrounding incomplete information [ 28 , 29 ].
Besides these technical issues, there are other, larger aspects where the research
could be fruitfully exploited. We point out here three particular avenues where our
current research is focused. One is the extension of the ideas to other data models, in
particular to semistructured data models (XML). There is already a very large body
of work on users tagging content in social web sites. Such research assumes very
simple organization of the data; a more formal approach that exploits XML Schema
could complement such research.
Another idea is to exploit the framework in the context of inherently distributed
tasks, like collaborative document editing . While several software tools already
exist for this task, most of them limit user input to document edits, not allowing or
strictly restricting the use of tags or comments. Such systems usually have problems
with conflict resolution, depending on simple voting schemas. Letting users add
metadata to the documents may give an additional perspective on users' views of
modifications and allow more sophisticated schemas for integration of versions.
Finally, the information obtained here can be exploited in many different ways.
We have briefly sketched a few uses in Sect. 7.6 , but the list there was not meant to
be exhaustive. A long-term goal of our research is to implement the ideas described,
test them in a real-life system, and analyze the data obtained to determine potential
uses for it. As usually happens when users are allowed to provide content, we
expect several unanticipated results from this research.
Acknowledgments This research was sponsored by NSF under grant CAREER IIS-0347555. The
author is very grateful to his Program Manager, Maria Zemankova, for her support and patience.