Information ubiquity has created a large crowd of users (most
  notably scientists), who could employ DBMS technology to process and
  share their data more effectively. Still, this user base prefers to
  keep its data in files that can be easily managed by applications such
  as spreadsheets, rather than deal with the complexity and rigidity
  of modern database systems. 

  In this paper, we propose a vision for enabling non-experts, such as
  scientists, to build \emph{content sharing communities} in a true
  database fashion: declaratively. The proposed infrastructure, called
  the {\em data ring}, enables users to manage and share their data
  with minimal effort; the user points to the data that should be
  shared, and the data ring becomes responsible for automatically
  indexing the data (to make it accessible), replicating it (for
  availability), and reorganizing its physical storage (for better
  query performance). We outline the salient features of our proposal,
  and outline research challenges that must be addressed in order to
  realize this vision.