Webdam Project

Alban Galland will defend his PhD, September 28th 2011 at 15:00, room 455 of PCRI at Gif-sur-Yvette (Plateau de Saclay)

Title: Distributed Data Management with Access Control
– Social Networks and Data of the Web

Abstract: The amount of information on the Web is spreading very rapidly. Users as
well as companies bring data to the network and are willing to share with
others. They quickly reach a situation where their information is hosted on
many machines they own and on a large number of autonomous systems
where they have accounts. Management of all this information is rapidly
becoming beyond human expertise. We introduce WebdamExchange, a
novel distributed knowledge-base model that includes logical statements
for specifying information, access control, secrets, distribution, and knowl-
edge about other peers. These statements can be communicated, replicated,
queried, and updated, while keeping track of time and provenance. The
resulting knowledge guides distributed data management. WebdamEx-
change model is based on WebdamLog, a new rule-based language for
distributed data management that combines in a formal setting deductive
rules as in Datalog with negation, (to specify intensional data) and active
rules as in Datalog¬¬ (for updates and communications). The model pro-
vides a novel setting with a strong emphasis on dynamicity and interactions
(in a Web 2.0 style). Because the model is powerful, it provides a clean
basis for the specification of complex distributed applications. Because it
is simple, it provides a formal framework for studying many facets of the
problem such as distribution, concurrency, and expressivity in the context
of distributed autonomous peers. We also discuss an implementation of a
proof-of-concept system that handles all the components of the knowledge
base and experiments with a lighter system designed for smartphones. We
believe that these contributions are a good foundation to overcome the
problems of Web data management, in particular with respect to access
control.

News defense, Members, P2P, Privacy, Report

Pierre Bourhis will defend his PhD, February 11th 2011, in room N107 of Parc-Club of Orsay.

Title: On the dynamics of active documents for distributed data management

Abstract: One of the major issues faced by Web applications is the management of evolving of data. In this thesis, we consider this problem and in particular the evolution of active documents. Active documents is a formalism describing the evolution of XML documents by activating Web services calls included in the document. It has already been used in the context of the management of distributed data axml.
The main contributions of this thesis are theoretical studies motivated by two systems for managing respectively stream applications and workflow applications. In a first contribution, we study the problem of view maintenance over active documents. The results served as the basis for an implementation of stream processors based on active documents called Axlog widgets. In a second one, we see active documents as the core of data centric workflows and consider various ways of expressing constraints on the evolution of documents. The implementation, called Axart, validated the approach of a data centric workflow system based on active documents.

News defense