Peer-to-peer management of XML data

Abstract

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.