System Support for Distributed Information Change Monitoring

Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

The project investigates the design and implementation issues in the mointoring of information changes in large distributed networks such as the Internet and World Wide Web. One of the objectives is to develop efficient and scalable strategies, techniques, and systems support for distributed control of large numbers of information change monitoring requests. Research questions to be addressed include the following. What software techniques and tools are able to extract, integrate, and query streams of data over semi-structured or unstructured data? Which distributed trigger and data processing techniques are most scalable and yet efficient in the presence of millions of information change monitoring requests? How do change monitors adapt to wide system parameter variations in runtime environments such as the Internet? How do they scale up as the number of information sources reach millions? Critical system components include change detection algorithms (e.g., tree comparison for web pages), trigger and query grouping, indexing, and caching, as well as parallel processing. Appropriate components will be implemented and evaluated through simulation and measurements on the Internet. These experiments will emphasize the efficiency and scalability of Internet-scale information change monitoring systems. The research results will aid in the engineering, implementation and evaluation of systems and middleware software support for scalable and efficient processing of distributed triggers and queries, as well as effective detection and notification of information changes.