Data sharing in distributed computing environment

The evolution of distributed computing has made sharing of data sources an urgent necessity at the present time. It is desired to benefit from distributed data sources that spread across a network. Efforts have been made by researchers and private companies to propose approaches for accessing remote, heterogeneous and autonomous data sources to share them across a network. Other efforts are looking at these approaches and the concepts in them with the aim of developing applications in both centralized and decentralized environments to provide access to and sharing of data sources. In this paper, we review two data sharing approaches that have been proposed, namely Transaction Processing Monitors and Resource Description Framework. For each approach, we will present its architecture, limitations and problems, as well as applications that have been developed based on its concepts.