What is going to be as important in the next 20 years as relational databases were in the prior 20 years is the management of self-describing extensible messages. The net is undergoing a profound change as it moves from an entirely pull-oriented model into a push model. This latter model is far more biological in nature with an increasing amount of information flowing asynchronously through the system to form an InformationBus. The key challenges for the next 20 years will be storing, routing,

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... uerying, filtering, managing, and interacting with this bus in a manner that doesn't lead to total systems degradation. Predictive intelligent filtering and rules engines will become more important than querying. Driving factors for this revolution will be the need for push for portable devices due to their poor latency and intermittent communication, an increasing demand for timely information on fully connected devices, a huge rise in application to application integration through asynchronous messaging based on web services and a concomitant requirement for an entirely new type of message broker, and an increasing desire for intelligent agents to cope with information overload as all information becomes available all the time. The key enabling technology will be XML messages and the various technologies that will develop for handling XML ranging from transformation to compression to indexing to storage to programming languages.