Evaggelia Pitoura

Locating objects in mobile computing

In current distributed systems, the notion of mobility is emerging in many forms and applications. Mobility arises naturally in wireless computing since the location of users changes as they move. Besides mobility in wireless computing, software mobile agents are another popular form of moving objects. Locating objects, i.e., identifying their current location, is central to mobile computing. We present a comprehensive survey of the various approaches to the problem of storing, querying, and updating the location of objects in mobile computing. The fundamental techniques underlying the proposed approaches are identified, analyzed, and classified along various dimensions.

Maintaining consistency of data in mobile distributed environments

To deal with the frequent, foreseeable and variable disconnections that occur in a mobile environment, we introduce a flexible, two-level consistency model. Semantically related or closely located data are grouped together to form a cluster. While all data inside a cluster are mutually consistent, degrees of inconsistency are allowed among data at different clusters. To take advantage of the predictability of disconnections, and to accommodate mobility, the cluster configuration is dynamic. We allow transactions to exhibit certain degrees of tolerance for inconsistencies by introducing strict and weak operations. Weak operations are operations that can be executed under weaker consistency requirements. We define correctness criteria for schedules that involve weak operations and compare them with traditional serializability criteria. Finally, we argue that our model is appropriate for a variety of other environments including very large databases and multidatabases.

Business models and transactions in mobile electronic commerce: requirements and properties

Abstract Advances in wireless network technology and the continuously increasing number of users of hand-held terminals make the latter a possible channel for offering personalized services to mobile users and give pace to the rapid development of mobile electronic commerce (MEC). MEC operates partially in a different environment than Internet e-commerce due to the special characteristics and constraints of mobile terminals and wireless networks and the context, situations and circumstances in which people use their hand-held terminals. In this paper, we discuss the business models in MEC and transaction modeling issues pertinent for the business models and the environment.

Search result diversification

Result diversification has recently attracted much attention as a means of increasing user satisfaction in recommender systems and web search. Many different approaches have been proposed in the related literature for the diversification problem. In this paper, we survey, classify and comparatively study the various definitions, algorithms and metrics for result diversification.

Content-Based Routing of Path Queries in Peer-to-Peer Systems

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems are gaining increasing popularity as a scalable means to share data among a large number of autonomous nodes. In this paper, we consider the case in which the nodes in a P2P system store XML documents. We propose a fully decentralized approach to the problem of routing path queries among the nodes of a P2P system based on maintaining specialized data structures, called filters that efficiently summarize the content, i.e., the documents, of one or more node. Our proposed filters, called multi-level Bloom filters, are based on extending Bloom filters so that they maintain information about the structure of the documents. In addition, we advocate building a hierarchical organization of nodes by clustering together nodes with similar content. Similarity between nodes is related to the similarity between the corresponding filters. We also present an efficient method for update propagation. Our experimental results show that multi-level Bloom filters outperform the classical Bloom filters in routing path queries. Furthermore, the content-based hierarchical grouping of nodes increases recall, that is, the number of documents that are retrieved.

Object orientation in multidatabase systems

A multidatabase system (MDBS) is a confederation of preexisting distributed, heterogeneous, and autonomous database systems. There has been a recent proliferation of research suggesting the application of object-oriented techniques to facilitate the complex task of designing and implementing MDBSs. Although this approach seems promising, the lack of a general framework impedes any further development. The goal of this paper is to provide a concrete analysis and categorization of the various ways in which object orientation has affected the task of designing and implementing MDBSs. We identify three dimensions in which the object-oriented paradigm has influenced this task: the general system architecture, the schema architecture, and the heterogeneous transaction management. Then we provide a classification and a comprehensive analysis of the issues related to each of the above dimensions. To demonstrate the applicability of this analysis, we conclude with a comparative review of existing multidatabase systems.

A survey on representation, composition and application of preferences in database systems

Preferences have been traditionally studied in philosophy, psychology, and economics and applied to decision making problems. Recently, they have attracted the attention of researchers in other fields, such as databases where they capture soft criteria for queries. Databases bring a whole fresh perspective to the study of preferences, both computational and representational. From a representational perspective, the central question is how we can effectively represent preferences and incorporate them in database querying. From a computational perspective, we can look at how we can efficiently process preferences in the context of database queries. Several approaches have been proposed but a systematic study of these works is missing. The purpose of this survey is to provide a framework for placing existing works in perspective and highlight critical open challenges to serve as a springboard for researchers in database systems. We organize our study around three axes: preference representation, preference composition, and preference query processing.

Data consistency in intermittently connected distributed systems

Mobile computing introduces a new form of distributed computation in which communication is most often intermittent, low-bandwidth, or expensive, thus providing only weak connectivity. We present a replication scheme tailored for such environments. Bounded inconsistency is defined by allowing controlled deviation among copies located at weakly connected sites. A dual database interface is proposed that in addition to read and write operations with the usual semantics supports weak read and write operations. In contrast to the usual read and write operations that read consistent values and perform permanent updates, weak operations access only local and potentially inconsistent copies and perform updates that are only conditionally committed. Exploiting weak operations supports disconnected operation since mobile clients can employ them to continue to operate even while disconnected. The extended database interface coupled with bounded inconsistency offers a flexible mechanism for adapting replica consistency to the networking conditions by appropriately balancing the use of weak and normal operations. Adjusting the degree of divergence among copies provides additional support for adaptivity. We present transaction-oriented correctness criteria for the proposed schemes, introduce corresponding serializability-based methods, and outline protocols for their implementation. Then, some practical examples of their applicability are provided. The performance of the scheme is evaluated for a range of networking conditions and varying percentages of weak transactions by using an analytical model developed for this purpose.

Peer-to-peer management of XML data: issues and research challenges

Peer-to-peer (p2p) systems are attracting increasing attention as an efficient means of sharing data among large, diverse and dynamic sets of users. The widespread use of XML as a standard for representing and exchanging data in the Internet suggests using XML for describing data shared in a p2p system. However, sharing XML data imposes new challenges in p2p systems related to supporting advanced querying beyond simple keyword-based retrieval. In this paper, we focus on data management issues for processing XML data in a p2p setting, namely indexing, replication, clustering and query routing and processing. For each of these topics, we present the issues that arise, survey related research and highlight open research problems.

Mobile agents for World Wide Web distributed database access

The popularity of the Web as a universal access mechanism for network information has created the need for developing Web-based DBMS client/server applications. However, the current commercial applet-based approaches for accessing database systems offer limited flexibility, scalability, and robustness. We propose a new framework for Web-based distributed access to database systems based on Java-based mobile agents. The framework supports lightweight, portable, and autonomous clients as well as operation on slow or expensive networks. The implementation of the framework using the aglet workbench shows that its performance is comparable to, and in some case outperforms, the current approach. In fact, in wireless and dial-up environments and for average size transactions, a client/agent/server adaptation of the framework provides a performance improvement of approximately a factor of ten. For the fixed network, the gains are about 40 percent and 30 percent, respectively. We expect our framework to perform even better when deployed using different implementation platforms as indicated by our preliminary results from an implementation based on Voyager.