Meeting of August 7, 1997

Status report from RIP project - Requirements gathering in progress. See web page for drafts as they progress.

Data Access Model discussion and presentations on various proposed approaches to the problems of data organization and data access. We covered much territory in this discussion. A few of the key points pertaining to the work which much be done by the working group, to flesh out and evaluate the various approaches:

• the differences and simularities (which may be more than we realize) between the models must be understood
• prototyping - each approach studied should demonstrate through a combination of actual measurements and calculations that the model will meet the requirements. Some felt more than a model should be the outcome of working group studies - demonstrated working software was mentioned by some.
• how lightweight is lightweight? some felt it might not be very lightweight in the end unless considerable trimming of desirable features was done. Would not have the baggage of transaction processsing as found in most commercial data management products.
• we must bear in mind that the models might not work merely because of our lack of understanding of real usage patterns and socialogical requirements.
• as well as requirements (mandatories and desirables) we must keep the cost/benefit factor in mind.
• we need some example analyses to work with. The group should be defining the benchmarks and examples to be used on each of the possible models/approaches.