J OURNAL OF OBJECT TECHNOLOGY Online at http://www.jot.fm . Published by ETH Zurich, Chair of Software Engineering ©JOT, 2007 Vol. 6, No. 4, May-June 2007 Cite this column as follows: Won Kim: “On Challenges for Information Management Technology”, in Journal of Object Technology, vol. 6, no. 4, May - June 2007, pp. 25 - 32 http://www.jot.fm/issues/issue_2007_05/column3 On Challenges for Information Management Technology Won Kim, School of Information and Communication Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, S. Korea Abstract Today information management technology faces two major related challenges. One is to tame the information and options explosion that are upon us. Another is to support the information needs in the ubiquitous environments that are being created. These two challenges have received considerable attention from various segments of information management technology research community. Some of the subjects of research have been addressed sufficiently, while other subjects still require considerable research. In this paper, I review and analyze the challenges, and offer some directions for some of the subjects of research, so as to help marshal the creative energies of the corresponding segments of the research community for faster solutions to the challenges. 1 INTRODUCTION Today people suffer through two major maladies brought about by the advances in information technology and wide adoption of it during the past few decades, from ever- powerful personal computers to the Internet. These are information explosion, and options overload in computer systems and electronic devices people use. There are many elements of information technology that have contributed to today’s information explosion. These include semi-conductor, display, digital storage, personal computers, networking, communications, multimedia processing, and digital convergence, among others. These have enabled the storage, processing, and transmission of all types of information using computers. The Internet has already become an indispensable source of information of all types for the masses. As such, corporations, governments, and various for-profit and non-profit organizations post information and advertise on the Internet. The Internet has also released people’s apparent pent-up desire for self-expression and comradeship with people they do not even know, in the form of user-created contents, blogs, posting of documents of all types, opinions about all types of things, and responses to questions from others. This has made the World-Wide Web an even richer source of information, and yet at the same time has greatly aggravated the