The Piazza peer data management system

Alon Y. Halevy, University of Washington
Zachary G. Ives, University of Pennsylvania
Jayant Madhavan, University of Washington
Peter Mork, University of Washington
Dan Suciu, University of Washington
Igor Tatarinov, University of Washington

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Copyright 2004 IEEE. Reprinted from IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Volume 16, Issue 7, July 2004, pages 787-798.
Publisher URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?isNumber=29215&puNumber=69

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Abstract

Intuitively, data management and data integration tools should be well-suited for exchanging information in a semantically meaningful way. Unfortunately, they suffer from two significant problems: They typically require a comprehensive schema design before they can be used to store or share information and they are difficult to extend because schema evolution is heavyweight and may break backward compatibility. As a result, many small-scale data sharing tasks are more easily facilitated by non-databaseoriented tools that have little support for semantics. The goal of the peer data management system (PDMS) is to address this need: We propose the use of a decentralized, easily extensible data management architecture in which any user can contribute new data, schema information, or even mappings between other peers’ schemas. PDMSs represent a natural step beyond data integration systems, replacing their single logical schema with an interlinked collection of semantic mappings between peers’ individual schemas. This paper describes several aspects of the Piazza PDMS, including the schema mediation formalism, query answering and optimization algorithms, and the relevance of PDMSs to the Semantic Web.