Services-based data management in a global computing environment

One of the main challenges in today's world of vastly distributed sources of information is to re-combine information sources to provide uniform access. We propose a distributed data management system that should provide the "glue" for combining data sources. This system advocates services as a means to access data. New services are defined on demand and their creation is supported by a behaviorist approach that incorporates new service ideas provided by the user. Services can be based on data and/or on the output of existing services. To increase the usability of services in the system we utilize two ontologies to denote relevant metadata. Service ontology structures existing services and helps in discovering new ones. Parameter ontology structures the parameters used in services and supports the creation of new services. Our proposal of a services-based data management system exhibits similarities to the newsgroup approach in that both "systems" are examples of semantic search engines based on user interaction. By exploring these similarities and by looking at some statistics of newsgroup user/posting behavior, we validate our services-based approach.