T raceable Peer­to­Peer Record Exchange

Peer-to-peer (P2P ) technology allows us flexible information sharing and communications in a wide-spread network. Unlike the traditional client-server architecture, a P2P network enables a peer to publish information and share data with other peers without central server control. In such an environment, tracing how data is copied between peers and how data modifications are performed is not easy because data replications and modifications are performed independently by autonomous peers. This brings inconsistency in exchanged information and results in lack of reliability. To provide reliable and flexible information exchange facility in P2P networks, I am working on a framework for traceable record exchange in a P2P network. In this framework, a peer can exchange structured records with a predefined schema among other peers. The framework supports a tracing facility to query the lineage of the obtained records. A tracing query is described in datalog and executed as a recursive query among cooperating peers in a P2P network. In the query execution process, the exchange and modification histories of the queried records are collected dynamically from the related peers. In this paper, the background, the motivation, the outline of the approach, and the current on-going work are presented.