Web 2.0 is a buzzword we have been hearing for over 2 years. According to Wikipedia, it hints at an improved form of the World Wide Web where technologies such as weblogs, social bookmarking, RSS feeds, photo and video sharing, based on an architecture of participation and democracy that encourages users to add value to the application as they use it. Web 2.0 enables social networking on the Web by allowing users to contribute content, share it, rate it, create a network of friends, and decide what they like to see and how they want it to look like.

In this panel, we propose to explore what Web 2.0 has to do with databases. Among the questions we will ask are: Are we going to be building new kinds of databases with Web 2.0? What does it mean when 1 million people are building a database as a collaborative effort? What is a new notion of schemas and queries that we need to develop for such scenarios? The main point of controversy is that while some people think that Web 2.0 requires a new data management infrastructure, others view it as a great opportunity to integrate many ”small” distributed databases which store users and content. We finish the panel by asking the question: Are there databases we can build now that could not be built earlier because we have mass collaboration?

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