Data managed by information systems are more and more complex, distributed, heterogeneous, dynamic, and of various forms. The DBWeb project focus on the fundamental issues raised in modern data and knowledge management systems, especially on the Web or in collaborative contexts oriented towards peer-to-peer networks. Our research interests cover both theoretical fundations of database management systems, practical solutions and applications, as well as cognitive aspects. Here are the main research projects we are involved in. ISICIL http://isicil.inria.fr/ Our contribution in the ISICIL project concerns trust managment in open communities and online social networks. It is often necessary in data management applications to control the ways in which data is accessed, modified and transformed. When data is under centralized control, arbitrarily complex restriction scenarios can be actively enforced inside the boundaries of the owner. All this becomes much harder when data cannot be actively controlled and monitored, for instance when it is shared in a distributed and open context such as large social networks for information and knowledge sharing. The management of trust and privacy is becoming crucial in many applications, like the collaborative publishing of information (Wikipedia, open software communities, e-bay) or social networks applications. Many novel issues are raised in such contexts and one of our objectives is to study appropriate models and tools for trust and privacy management. More precisely, the ISICIL project must innovate on the following points: (1) Better understanding of the use of trust models and their limits in open communities. (2) Developing suitable models for privacy based on trust measures in open communities for information sharing and publishing. In particular, these models should allow data owners to preserve their anonymity and to control how private information is disseminated, accessed or modified. The ISICIL project (2009–2011) is sponsored by the French national research agency ANR (Agence Nationale de la Recherche), within the programme Content and Interactions (CONTINT). DEUS We are witnessing today a tremendous growth of the so called structured Web, in which documents are no longer quasi-textual, but are data-centric, presenting structured content, complex objects, a Web in which information is no longer served “raw”. While current search platforms have mostly benefited from top research in information retrieval and distributed systems, the shift towards schematized data calls for more precise, richer querying of the Web and raises new challenges to which the data management community can provide answers. We believe that a key challenge for future Web interrogation is to leverage the structured part of the Web, for better understanding, extraction and access to data that would enable richer search interactions. Expanding beyond entity search applications, which focus on simple, atomic objects, and building on the idea that such simple, easily recognizable entities can be further organized into more complex relations or objects, often with spatio-temporal components, denoted structured object descriptions, in short SODs, we intend to study in this project the theoretical and practical challenges that are raised in querying for complex objects on the structured Web. MILC http://www.infres.enst.fr/~milc/Research.html This research on language and cognition (MILC sub-project) focuses on the quest for fundamental principles underlying the language faculty and the will to communicate. The main areas of interest are currently relevance and honest communication. Webdam http://webdam.inria.fr/wordpress/ The goal of the Webdam project, headed by Serge Abiteboul from INRIA Sacalay, is to develop a formal model for Web data management. This model will open new horizons for the development of the Web in a well-principled way, enhancing its functionality, performance, and reliability. Specifically, the goal is to develop a universally accepted formal framework for describing complex and flexible interacting Web applications featuring notably data exchange, sharing, integration, querying and updating. We also propose to develop formal foundations that will enable peers to concurrently reason about global data management activities, cooperate in solving specific tasks and support services with desired quality of service. Although the proposal addresses fundamental issues, its goal is to serve as the basis for future software development for Web data management. The Webdam project is funded by the European Research Council under the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant Webdam, agreement n° 226513. DataRing http://www.lina.univ-nantes.fr/projets/DataRing/ The DataRing project addresses the problem of P2P data sharing for online communities, by offering a high-level network ring across distributed data source owners. Users may be in high numbers and interested in different kinds of collaboration and sharing their knowledge, ideas, experiences, etc. Data sources can be in high numbers, fairly autonomous, i.e. locally owned and controlled, and highly heterogeneous with different semantics and structures. What we need then is new decentralized data management techniques that scale up while addressing the autonomy, dynamic behavior and heterogeneity of both users and data sources. The DataRing project (2009–2011) is sponsored by the French national research agency ANR (Agence Nationale de la Recherche), within the programme Future Networks and Services (VERSO). WebPlan http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/isg/projects/WebPlan/ The functioning of entities as diverse as enterprises and government agencies depends on obtaining high-quality data. Increasingly these entities depend on external sources for their operational data: critical data is obtained dynamically via web services, is extracted from web pages, or is purchased from third parties. These sources can differ radically in their completeness, accuracy, and availability. It is not possible for applications to index and explore data from each source in advance of querying: there are too many sources, they are too costly to access, and the data in them may be refreshed constantly. How should data acquisition proceed in such situations? In this project we will develop algorithms for answering queries in the presence of large numbers of web-based data sources, sources that may overlap substantially in their datasets but have different access restrictions and costs. Our approach will make use of schema information about the data an application is querying: data format, integrity constraints, and any prior knowledge of costs that may be available. The core of the project will be algorithms for answering a query by interactively exploring the sources, dynamically pruning out irrelevant or exhausted sources in the process. WebPlan is sponsored by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). PANIC http://www.infres.enst.fr/wp/projetpanic This research project, which involves economists and social scientists, deals with the evolution of the audience of cultural media (books, press, games, music, etc.) with the advent of digitization and the Internet. In this project, we are involved in data cleaning and data enrichment tasks. The PANIC project (2009–2011) is sponsored by the French national research agency ANR (Agence Nationale de la Recherche), within the programme Content and Interaction (CONTINT). REWRITE We study in this project the problem of querying data sources that accept only a limited set of queries, such as sources accessible by Web services which can implement very large (potentially infinite) families of queries. We first revisit a classical setting in which the application queries are conjunctive queries and the source accepts families of (possibly parameterized) conjunctive queries specified as the expansions of a (potentially recursive) Datalog program with parameters, under the assumption that sources satisfy integrity constraints. We then consider XML queries and views. The standard approach for optimization of XPath queries by rewriting using views techniques consists in navigating inside a view’s output, thus allowing the usage of only one view in the rewritten query. Algorithms for richer classes of XPath rewritings, using intersection or joins on node identifiers, have been proposed, but they either lack completeness guarantees, or require additional information about the data. We study restrictions under which an XPath can be rewritten in polynomial time using an intersection of views and effective algorithms that can work for any documents or type of identifiers. Moreover, we are interested in the complexity of the related problem of deciding if an XPath with intersection can be equivalently rewritten as one without intersection or union. Starting from our novel techniques for XML query answering using multiple views, we then study expressibility and support when a (potentially infinite) set of views is specified using the QSS (Query Set Specification) formalism. Arcomem http://www.arcomem.eu/ Arcomem is about memory institutions like archives, museums, and libraries in the age of the Social Web. Memory institutions are more important now than ever: as we face greater economic and environmental challenges we need our understanding of the past to help us navigate to a sustainable future. This is a core function of democracies, but this function faces stiff new challenges in face of the Social Web, and of the radical changes in information creation, communication and citizen involvement that currently characterise our information society (e.g., there are now more social network hits than Google searches). Social media are becoming more and more pervasive in all areas of life. In the UK, for example, it is now not unknown for a government minister to answer a parliamentary question using Twitter, and this material is both ephemeral and highly contextualised, making it increasingly difficult for a political archivist to decide what to preserve. This new world challenges the relevance and power of our memory institutions. To answer these challenges, Arcomem’s aim is to: help transform archives into collective memories that are more tightly integrated with their community of users exploit Social Web and the wisdom of crowds to make Web archiving a more selective and meaning-based process To do this we will provide innovative tools for archivists to help exploit the new media and make our organisational memories richer and more relevant. We will do this in three ways: we will show how social media can help archivists select material for inclusion, providing content appraisal via the social web we will show how social media mining can enrich archives, moving towards structured preservation around semantic categories we will look at social, community and user-based archive creation methods The Arcomem project (2011–2013) is sponsored by the European Union, within the 7th framework programme on digital libraries and digital presevation. WikiSigned http://perso.telecom-paristech.fr/~maniu/wikisigned/ Large online communities that contribute and share content account nowadays for a significant and highly qualitative portion of the data on the Web. Examples of collaborative applications oriented towards building repositories of quality user-generated content include online encyclopedias (Wikipedia, Knol), photo sharing sites (Flickr) or rating sites (Epinions). An important trend in such platforms aims at exploiting user relationships, links between users (e.g., social links), in order to improve core functionalities in the system. For instance, search, recommendation or access control can benefit from socially-driven approaches. This is especially the case when links can be viewed as being signed, indicating a positive or negative attitude; possible meanings for positive links could be trust, friendship or similarity, while for negative links they could stand for distrust, opposition or antagonism. In settings where explicit relationships do not exist, are sparse or are inadequate indicators of the attitude towards fellow members of the community, it becomes thus important to uncover implicit user inter-connections, positive or negative links, from relevant user activities and their interactions. This project aims at: designing methods to automatically extract signed networks from the social Web, establishing sound metrics and methods for validating the inferred signed networks, addressing the computational challenges inherent to the large-scale extraction and creation of the networks, designing applications (e.g., recommendation systems, personalised search) that fully exploit the signed social links. University of California San Diego http://db.ucsd.edu/People/alin/ INRIA Saclay – Île-de-France http://www.inria.fr/saclay/ LIG http://www.liglab.fr/ LIRMM http://www.lirmm.fr/ INRIA Rennes – Bretagne Atlantique http://www.inria.fr/rennes/ Oxford University Computing Laboratory http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/ Conservatoire national des Arts et Métiers http://www.cnam.fr/ Université Paris-Nord 13 http://www.univ-paris13.fr/ Orange Labs http://www.orange.com/en_EN/innovation/ University of Sheffield http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/ Leibniz Universität Hannover http://www.l3s.de/ Yahoo! Iberia http://labs.yahoo.com/Yahoo_Labs_Barcelona Internet Memory Foundation http://internetmemory.org/ University of Southampton http://www.soton.ac.uk/ Athens Technology Center http://www.atc.gr/ Athena Research and Innovation Center in Information Communication and Knowledge Technologies http://www.imis.athena-innovation.gr/ Deutsche Welle http://www.dw-world.de/ Südwestrundfunk http://www.swr.de/ Hellenic Parliament http://www.hellenicparliament.gr/ Austrian Parliament http://www.parliament.gv.at/