The ASTERIX project is developing new technologies for ingesting, storing, managing, indexing, querying, analyzing, and subscribing to vast quantities of semi-structured information.
The project is combining ideas from three distinct areas semi-structured data, parallel databases, and data-intensive computing  to create a next-generation, open source software platform that scales by running on large, shared-nothing commodity computing clusters.
ASTERIX targets a wide range of semi-structured information, ranging from data use cases where information is well-tagged and highly regular to content use cases where data is irregular and much of each datum is textual.
ASTERIX is taking an open stance on data formats and addressing research issues including highly scalable data storage and indexing, semi-structured query processing on very large clusters, and merging parallel database techniques with todays data-intensive computing techniques to support performant yet declarative solutions to the problem of analyzing semi-structured information.