Cooperative Information Agents VI

Our goal in this paper is to study the problem of the interaction among databases in a peer-to-peer (P2P) network. We propose a new approach, that we call “data (base) coordination”, that rejects the assumption, made for instance in data integration, that the involved databases act as if they were a single (virtual) database, modeled as a global schema. From an operational point of view, the distinguishing feature of data coordination is that many of the parameters (metadata) influencing the interaction among peer databases are decided at run time. For any given query, the involved databases interact using the most “appropriate” (virtual) schema. This is crucial for dealing with the strong dynamics of a P2P network. We provide four basic architectural notions and hint how they are the building blocks of a possible distributed implementation capable of coordinating databases in a P2P network.