Public Health for the Internet φ Towards A New Grand Challenge for Information Management

Business incentives have brought us within a small factor of achieving the database community's Grand Challenge set out in the Asilomar Report of 1998. This paper makes the case for a new, focused Grand Challenge: Public Health for the Internet. The goal of PHI (or φ) is to enable collectives of hosts on the Internet to jointly monitor and promote network health by sharing information on network conditions in a peer-to-peer fashion. We argue that this will be a positive effort for the research community for a variety of reasons, both in terms of its technical reach and its societal impact. This version of the φ vision is targeted at readers in the database research community, but the effort is clearly multidisciplinary. A more generalist version of this paper will be maintained at http://openphi.net.