Honeycomb: A Community-Based System for Distributed Data Integration and Sharing

How to share the data in databases of autonomous organizations quickly and flexibly is an important problem. Traditional data integration systems are supposed to be a solution to the problem. Unfortunately, they require a global schema before they can be used to share data and they are centralized system. They can not support data sharing without a common schema and on-demand data sharing in applications. In addition, security is also the important requirements. This paper presents a community-based system for distributed data integration and sharing, Honeycomb. Honeycomb supports many virtual data integration and sharing systems on a single machine, and the system utilizes Web services to access data on other nodes to avoid changing security configuration of autonomous organizations. In addition, the system adopts new cache techniques to improve performance greatly.