Fourth International Workshop on Databases, Information Systems and Peer-to-Peer Computing (2006)

Recently, the P2P paradigm is embracing mobile computing and ad-hoc networks in an attempt to achieve even higher ubiquitousness. The possibility of data and services related to physical location and the relation with peers and sensors in physical proximity could introduce new opportunities and also new technical challenges. Such dynamic environments, which are inherently characterized by high mobility and heterogeneity of resources like devices, participants, services, information and data representation, pose several issues on how to search and localize resources, how to efficiently route traffic, up to higher level problems related to semantic interoperability and information relevance. The use of ontologies for the descriptions of peers and services could introduce new approaches for querying, sharing, distributing and organizing knowledge. Nevertheless, several challenges related to the association of services/contents to ontologies, the interoperability/ integration of ontologies required for understanding different contents and the automation of such processes rise. A sample applicative scenario may be the offer of new services for business trades on the basis of the client requirements both established by means of (different) ontologies. On the basis of the physical location, the client ontology contacts other ontologies, executing automatic integration/ interoperation/ reconciliation processes whereas information are expressed according with different ontologies. Analogous issues and similar scenarios may be depicted for static and wireless connectivity, and static and mobile architectures. The proposed workshop is built on the success of the three preceding editions at VLDB 2003, 2004 and 2005. It concentrates on exploring the synergies between current database research and P2P computing. It is our belief that database research has much to contribute to the P2P grand challenge through its wealth of techniques for sophisticated semantics-based data models, new indexing algorithms and efficient data placement, query processing techniques and transaction processing. Database technologies in the new information age will form the crucial components of the first generation of complex adaptive P2P information systems, which will be characterized by their ability to continuously self-organize, adapt to new circumstances, promote emergence as an inherent property, optimize locally but not necessarily globally, deal with approximation and incompleteness. This workshop also concentrates on the impact of complex adaptive information systems on current database technologies and their relation to emerging industrial technologies. The workshop is co-located with VLDB, the major international database and information systems conference, and brings together key researchers from all over the world working on databases and P2P computing with the intention of strengthening this connection. Researchers from other related areas such as distributed systems, networks, multi-agent systems and complex systems are also invited.