Mobile Information Management (MIM)

Executive Summary

This research investigates systems that attempt to resolve the scalability, heterogeneity, independence, and variability problems in large-scale distributed information integration.
The approach constructs multiple layers of abstraction in the form of autonomous components and focuses on flexible optimization that exploits redundancy in information pathways.
The autonomous components considered exchange and manage data, queries, query plans and distributed query processes in the form of mobile information.
Such components, dubbed Mobile Information Managers, rely heavily on optimization techniques that speed up query processing by using specialized access structures.
An interesting kind of optimization chooses between distributed plans that decide to perform computations in different sites.
These optimization depend on a cost model that takes into consideration connectivity, i.e., performance and reliability in networks.
Advances in networking and in computing technology are often changing the parameters of the model.
By demonstrating the feasibility and joint impact of several kinds of optimization needed in large-scale distributed information integration applications, the project hopes to constribute to better software engineering principles and ideas for such applications.
Several very active areas could make esential use of such applications: electronic commerce, digital libraries, scientific databases. This broader potential enhances the significance and the timeliness of this work.

Project Members

Publications

• ubQL, a Language for Programming Distributed Query Systems [abstract] [.ps] [.pdf] 
  International Workshop on the Web and Databases (WebDB) (2001)
  Arnaud Sahuguet   Val Tannen   
  

• Resource Sharing Through Query Process Migration [.pdf] 
  Technical Report MS-CIS-01-10 (2001)
  Arnaud Sahuguet   Val Tannen   
  

• Chaining, Referral, Subscription, Leasing: New Mechanisms in Distributed Query Optimization [abstract] [.ps] [.pdf] 
  unpublished (2000)
  Arnaud Sahuguet   Benjamin Pierce   Val Tannen   
  

• Distributed Query Optimization: Can Mobile Agents Help? [.ps] [.pdf] 
  unpublished (2000)
  Arnaud Sahuguet   Benjamin Pierce   Val Tannen