The Piazza peer data management project

TLDR

Sharing heterogeneous, semantically rich data is difficult, and Piazza offers a peer data management system that enables distributed, scalable sharing of such data. The paper presents an overview of the Piazza project, emphasizing mapping languages, query reformulation, user assistance, indexing, and access‑control features. Piazza requires participants to define pairwise schema mappings, after which users query their preferred schema and a recursive query‑answering system expands relevant mappings to retrieve data from peers, leveraging mapping languages, query reformulation, indexing, and access‑control mechanisms.

Abstract

A major problem in today's information-driven world is that sharing heterogeneous, semantically rich data is incredibly difficult. Piazza is a peer data management system that enables sharing heterogeneous data in a distributed and scalable way. Piazza assumes the participants to be interested in sharing data, and willing to define pairwise mappings between their schemas. Then, users formulate queries over their preferred schema, and a query answering system expands recursively any mappings relevant to the query, retrieving data from other peers. In this paper, we provide a brief overview of the Piazza project including our work on developing mapping languages and query reformulation algorithms, assisting the users in defining mappings, indexing, and enforcing access control over shared data.