Schema Mediation in Peer Data Management Systems

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 backwards compatibility. As a result, many small-scale data sharing tasks are more easily facilitated by non-database-oriented 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 bet...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: ICDE
• Authors: Alon Y. Halevy, Zachary G. Ives, Dan Suciu, Igor Tatarinov
• Keywords: Data Integration Formalisms, Data Integration Tools, Database, ICDE 2003, Single Logical Schema