  The challenge of managing unstructured data represents perhaps the largest
data management opportunity for our community since managing relational data.
And yet we are risking letting this opportunity go by, ceding the playing field
to other players, ranging from communities such as AI, KDD, IR, Web, and
Semantic Web, to industrial players such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. In
this essay we explore what we can do to improve upon this situation. Drawing on
the lessons learned while managing relational data, we outline a structured
approach to managing unstructured data. We conclude by discussing the potential
implications of this approach to managing other kinds of non-relational data,
and to the identify of our field.
