Abstract :
The recent years brought a massive change in the way data management is viewed. Data is being increasingly processed within networks. P2P computing and sensor networks are the most prominent examples. The classical separation of information systems from communication systems is disolving. We can observe that very similar problems are addressed by what before seemed fairly disparate research communities. For example, the problem of aggregating and filtering data within networks is being studied simultanously in information theory and networking, both classical EE fields, as well as in distributed systems and databases, both classical CS fields. Even researchers from so seemingly unrelated disciplines such as physics start to investigate these problems. This raises a number of issues of how research in this field is organized now and ought to be organized in the future.
