Fourth International Workshop on Databases, Information Systems and Peer-to-Peer Computing (DBISP2P 2006)

The aim of this fourth workshop is to explore the promise of P2P to offer exciting new possibilities in distributed information processing and database technologies. The realization of these promises lies fundamentally in the availability of enhanced services such as structured ways for classifying and registering shared information, verification and certification of information, content distributed schemes and quality of content, security features, information discovery and accessibility, interoperation and composition of active information services, and finally market-based mechanisms to allow cooperative and non cooperative information exchanges. The P2P paradigm lends itself to constructing large scale complex, adaptive, autonomous and heterogeneous database and information systems, endowed with clearly specified and differential capabilities to negotiate, bargain, coordinate and self-organize the information exchanges in large scale networks. This vision will have a radical impact on the structure of complex organizations (business, scientific or otherwise) and on the emergence and the formation of social communities, and on how the information is organized and processed. 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 will build on the success of the three preceding editions at VLDB 2003, 2004 and 2005. It will concentrate 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 will also concentrate on the impact of complex adaptive information systems on current database technologies and their relation to emerging industrial technologies such as IBM's autonomic computing initiative. The workshop will be co-located with VLDB, the major international database and information systems conference, and will bring 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 will also be invited.