Interoperability with unstructured data and services

A large percentage of valuable information is not stored in database management systems. Therefore, many applications must deal only only with heterogeneous structured data, but with a wide variety of unstructured and semi-structured data such as electronic mail, documents, files and spreadsheets. In addition, these applications must deal with heterogeneous services such as an electronic library or an airline reservation service. While it is, of course, important to study interoperability among heterogeneous conventional database systems, it is also very important to study interoperation in this broader domain, where application programs must interact with a wide variety of services and must handle many types of structures, unstructured, and semi-structured data.< >