9 ticks – The Web as a Stream

The Internet contains thousands of Frequently Updated, Timestamped, Structured (FUTS) data sources. This type of information represents a different class of information that is not properly handled by existing data management systems such as databases, data warehouses, search engines, pubsub, event processing, or information retrieval systems. In this position paper we describe 9ticks, a system we are designing to collect, parse, store, query, and disseminate FUTS information. 9ticks is helping us understand that all those steps raise new challenges but also bring new opportunities. In this paper we summarize the challenges identified and present our vision of an end-to-end FUTS management system.