"Data in Your Face": Push Technology in Perspective
Michael Franklin (University of Maryland)
Stan Zdonik (Brown University)

Push technology has recently generated a tremendous amount of media attention, commercial activity, and controversy. The wide range of opinions on push technology is understandable given that it represents a major departure from the way distributed information systems have traditionally been built. Adding to the noise, however, is confusion about the basic principles of push and where it fits in to the world of data delivery. We argue that this confusion stems from two fundamental causes: First, push is just one dimension of a larger design space of data delivery mechanisms. Second, networked information systems can employ different data delivery options between different sets of information producers and consumers. In this short paper we characterize the design space for dissemination-based information systems and applications, and show how current ``push'' solutions fit into this space. Additional information can be found at the Broadcast Disks/DBIS home page.