The global inter-networking infrastructure that has become essential for contemporary day-to-day computing and communication tasks, has also enabled the deployment of several large-scale data sharing overlays. Communities collaboratively aggregate and distribute file and storage resources either in the controlled environment of the Grid, or hidden under the anonymity cloak created by peer-to-peer protocols. Both designs exhibit unique properties and characteristics: Peer-to-peer algorithms address the formation of vast, heterogeneous and dynamic sharing networks, while Grids focus on policy enforcement and accounting features. A distributed data management facility that will assimilate respective practices has been envisioned by numerous related research initiatives, especially when there is a need to incorporate disperse resources in large pools, without relinquishing participants of their respective rights. In this paper, we describe the Distributed File Services (DFS) architecture -...