Philip A. Bernstein
Microsoft Research
Despite 30 years of research on database support for modeling, applications
and tools that manipulate discrete models remain complicated and hard to build.
To improve this situation by an order of magnitude, a much higher level application
programming interface is needed. We present a vision for such an interface --
a generic framework in which models and mappings are first-class objects supported
by high level algebraic operations. We describe tractable steps to validate
the approach and to produce useful results soon, as well as many hard problems
that a full realization of the vision must ultimately solve.
Philip A. Bernstein is a Senior Researcher in the database group of Microsoft Research and a contributor to the Microsoft Repository product group, where he was Architect from 1994-1998. He has published over 90 articles and 3 books on database systems, transaction processing, and related topics, and has contributed to many database system products, prototypes, and standards. His latest book is "Principles of Transaction Processing" (Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1996).