A Molecular Concept of Managing Data

The following (position) paper follows the concept of the field of Artificial Life and argues that the (relational) management of data can be understood as a chemical model. Whereas each data itself is consistent with atomic entities, each combination of data corresponds to a (artificial) molecular structure. For example, an attribute D inside a relational system can be represented by a nucleus aD sharing a cloud of values, which consists of so-called valectrons (the values for the column D). By using reaction rules like the selection of tuples or projection of attributes, a retrieve of molecules can be achieved quite easily. Advantages of the chemical model are no data types, a fast data access, and the associative nature of the molecules: this automatically supports a direct identification of patterns in the sense of data mining. A disadvantage is the need for restructuring that must eventually be done, because the incoming data stream is allowed to influence the chemical model. With this position paper, we present our basic concept.