A theory of data: Implications for information retrieval

The growing mountain of information in the form of numeric data poses a significant problem for those activities that support the data user. Existing database management systems are designed to connect data elements into records and produce reports — frequently in the form of tables. Tables of data, however, acquire a subsequent life of their own. They are analyzed, reworked, and combined with other tables, and then stored and retrieved for further analysis and presentation to others. This paper explores the problem of determining the requirements for a table-based storage and retrieval system based on an abstract data structure for tables as structural entities.