Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

In recent years, modern information systems have evolved in fundamental ways. As opposed to the traditional client-server architecture of data warehouses, modern informations systems consists of large volumes of distributed data sources, all connected by the Internet. Aside from being distributed, the data sources are also evolving, with their schemas updated frequently and asynchronously. Today's information systems are also heterogeneous. Beyond traditional databases, there is an emergence of novel sources of data. They include real-time streamed data, data services, sensor and radio frequency identification (RFID) readings. The proposed research program is on developing techniques for resilient user applications in the presence of asynchronous schema updates. We will develop techniques to allow user applications and queries to automatically adapt to evolving schema of heterogeneous data sets. These techniques will also enable mission critical applications to limit the evolution of remote databases with minimal restriction to ensure correct and uninterrupted data access. The proposed techniques will take into account the unique characteristics of novel data sources such as web services, data streams, and sensor/RFID data. The proposed program will also study the problem of autonomic storage and exchange of heterogeneous data in distributed information systems. Our objective is to design efficient layouts for storage and exchange for unstructured or semi-structured data sets or data streams. By analyzing the data to be stored or exchanged, we will develop algorithms to automatically design the storage and exchange layout that efficiently make use of available database systems and network resources. Aside from static data sets, we are particularly interested at data storage and exchange problem for evolving data sets and data streams.