PicShark: mitigating metadata scarcity through large-scale P2P collaboration

With the commoditization of digital devices, personal information and media sharing is becoming a key application on the pervasive Web. In such a context, data annotation rather than data production is the main bottleneck. Metadata scarcity represents a major obstacle preventing efficient information processing in large and heterogeneous communities. However, social communities also open the door to new possibilities for addressing local metadata scarcity by taking advantage of global collections of resources. We propose to tackle the lack of metadata in large-scale distributed systems through a collaborative process leveraging on both content and metadata. We develop a community-based and self-organizing system called PicShark in which information entropy ? in terms of missing metadata ? is gradually alleviated through decentralized instance and schema matching. Our approach focuses on semistructured metadata and confines computationally The work presented in this article was supporte...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: VLDB
• Authors: Philippe Cudré-Mauroux, Adriana Budura, Manfred Hauswirth, Karl Aberer
• Keywords: Collaborative Process Leveraging, Database, Local Metadata Scarcity, NSF National Competence, VLDB 2008