ITR: (Software & Hardware Systems) Piazza: A Platform for Wide-scale Distributed Data Sharing and Integration

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

This research seeks to create a new global-scale information facility on the Internet in which structured data, rather than raw text, is the key element supported. Currently, the information provided on the Internet consists of simple text-based documents (HTML), or other unstructured types such as images and streams. The new facility will allow data sources to be described by schemas and their content to be indexed and located. Sophisticated query-oriented database-style operations will be possible over simple or complex data sources, and new views of multiple data sources can be created and shared with other clients. A new class of data processing services will be possible to collect, manipulate, analyze, and store data. The first goal of project is to define the basic architecture of a client, allowing it to share its data with other peers, participate in distributed query processing, and cooperate with other clients. A specific data integration formalism will be designed that will allow clients to integrate their data with others' using both global-as-view and local-as-view data integration paradigms. Building on this arthictecture, a new query processing technique will be developed that can adapt to both data integration paradigms. The project will then develop intelligent data placement techniques for storing query results on different clients, thus enabling dramatic performance improvments for subsequent queries. The data such placed on servers may become stale, when the source data gets updated: the project will develop specific update propagation techniques for publishing and disseminating updates. Finally, the project is developing novel data indexing techniques that allow clients to search data items globally.