Converged Reality: A Data Management Research Agenda for a Service-, Cloud-, and Data-Driven Era

We are accustomed to distinguishing activities that occur on or through the Internet as distinct from activities that occur in the physical world: online versus offline, virtual reality versus reality, and so on. As Internet-based services have evolved, this distinction has continued to blur. We now have a converged reality: the online does not merely augment the offline, rather, the two are increasingly indistinguishable. Mobility, cloud computing, service-driven technology, cognitive computing, and Big Data analytics are some of the distinct but related innovations driving this shift. Because the shift is happening in pieces across multiple areas and sectors, our converged reality is emergent and grassroots, not a carefully planned joint effort. There are therefore areas that have been and will be slow to acknowledge and adapt to this shift, data management is one of these areas. This paper describes how this converged reality grew from previous research into bridging online and offline worlds, and how it will lead to a cognitive reality. It identifies enablers and dampeners, and describes a data management research agenda specifically for converged reality. The proposed research agenda is intended to spark discussion and engage further work in this area.