Fausto Giunchiglia (Univ. of Trento, Italy)
In this talk we identify desirable data management mechanisms for peer-to-peer (P2P) computing. P2P networks have to remain open and dynamic. Peers maintain full autonomy of their local resources and have a set of acquaintances (i.e., other peers) with which they exchange data and services. In such a setting, we argue that one cannot assume the existence of a global schema for all the peer information sources (this being the standard solution proposed so far). Instead, one needs a data model which views the space of data being managed ad an open collection of possibly overlapping and inconsistent databases. We propose an architecture and a semantics coherent with this view.