My current research is centered around how to make database systems more usable, particularly when the data involved comes from multiple heterogeneous sources, and has undergone many manipulations. Please see the web page on database usability for more details.

My research is contextually situated in two complementary arenas: (1) databases in the context of the internet; and (2) data management for biological sciences. What happens when you can connect many different databases that are autonomously organized and managed? How can you query and integrate and analyze all the information that you potentially have access to? How can one represent, and account for, variations in information structure and in information quality?

A tool that is useful in answering questions such as the above is XML. So the effective storage, querying and management of XML becomes an important prerequisite to answering questions such as the above. Most XML stores are thin veneers on top of traditional (relational or OO) databases. We believe that there is considerable loss in performance and expressiveness in so doing. Towards this end, we have built a native XML store -- a hierarchical database from the ground up for storing and querying XML data. We call this project TIMBER . A facility in TIMBER of particular interest is the ability to store and efficiently manipulate probabilistic information -- data that is known to be potentially erroneous.

We then use such an infrastructure in a variety of application domains with particular data management needs not easily met through traditional databases, including e-commerce, (automotive) engineering design, product lifecycle management (PLM) and so on. In particular, biological information comes in many different forms, ranging from textual information in published journal articles to a variety of online databases. As a demonstration of our ability to integrate a wide variety of information, we have constructed the Michigan Molecular Interactions Database (MiMI). These activities are being rolled up into the National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics.

I recently co-organized a workshop on data management issues for (molecular and cell) biology. Associated with this, I guest edited a special issue, devoted to data management for biology, of the OMICS journal on integrative biology. I was (co-)Program Chair for the ISMB Conference 2005.