Saravá was an INRIA associated team (“équipe associée”) with the database team at UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro, 2009-2011.
The general problem addressed in Sarava is P2P data sharing for online communities, with a focus on collaborative scientific research (e.g. bio-informatics) and social networking systems. The major advantage of a P2P approach is a completely decentralized approach to data sharing which does not require centralized administration. Users may be in high numbers and interested in different kinds of collaboration and sharing their knowledge, ideas, experiences, etc. Data sources can be in high numbers, fairly autonomous, i.e. locally owned and controlled, and highly heterogeneous with different semantics and structures. What we need then is new, decentralized data management techniques that scale up while addressing the autonomy, dynamic behavior and heterogeneity of both users and data sources.
To address this problem, we proposed three main, parallel tasks: 1. Define a P2P data management architecture for online communities supporting a data model and query language for uncertain data, and providing support for query processing and workflow management. The architecture should be independent of specific P2P networks so it can have wide applicability. 2. Design new, efficient query processing techniques (for this architecture) which deal with uncertain data and demonstrate their superiority through implementation and experimentation with social network applications. 3. Design new workflow techniques (for this architecture) and demonstrate their superiority through implementation and experimentation with scientific applications.
