Draining the Data Swamp: A Similarity-based Approach

While hierarchical namespaces such as filesystems and repositories have long been used to organize data, the rapid increase in data production places increasing strain on users who wish to make use of the data. So called "data lakes" embrace the storage of data in its natural form, integrating and organizing in a Pay-as-you-go fashion. While this model defers the upfront cost of integration, the result is that data is unusable for discovery or analysis until it is processed. Thus, data scientists are forced to spend significant time and energy on mundane tasks such as data discovery, cleaning, integration, and management -- when this is neglected, "data lakes" become "data swamps." Prior work suggests that pure computational methods for resolving issues with the data discovery and management components are insufficient. Here, we provide evidence to confirm this hypothesis, showing that methods such as automated file clustering are unable to extract the necessary features from repositories to provide useful information to end-user data scientists, or make effective data management decisions on their behalf. We argue that the combination of frameworks for specifying file similarity and human-in-the-loop interaction is needed to aid automated organization. We propose an initial step here, classifying several dimensions by which items may be considered similar: the data, its origin, and its current characteristics. We initially consider this model in the context of identifying data that can be integrated or managed collectively. We additionally explore how current methods can be used to automate decision making using real-world data repository and file systems, and suggest how an online user study could be developed to further validate this hypothesis.