DATA INTEGRATION IN A BANDWIDTH-RICH WORLD.

The article informs that exponential advances in sensors, storage systems and computers are producing data of unprecedented quantity and quality. Multi-terabyte and even petabyte data sets are emerging as major assets. The World-Wide Telescope linking hundreds of digital sky surveys is revolutionizing astronomy. And in industry multi-terabyte data warehouses of consumer transactional data are increasingly common. Today, data warehouses are centralized repositories of data used for reporting and querying. High-speed optical networks make it possible for data to instead be stored at its source. The article also informs that distributed data sources can be diverse in their formats, schema, quality, access mechanisms, ownership, access policies and capabilities. It says that data mining emerged from statistics as a new discipline during the past decade, as large data sets became more and more common and the need for new technology to mine them became critical. INSET: Data-Integration Technologies..