Paolo Atzeni:To structure or not to structure, is that the question?

A typical observation that was made a few years ago when comparing queries over databases and searches over the Web was that databases are inherently structured whereas the Web is not. Discussions were carried out on whether structure was a benefit or disadvantage and semistructured data was supported as a reasonable compromise. Here we will argue that the main issue is not the contrast or the coexhistence, but the need for transformation, especially referring to the techniques that recognize structure and exploit structure as the basis for semantics. An attempt will be made to argue for the relavance of various approaches and techniques, including information extraction, entity recognition, dataspaces, curation, annotation.