Research Issues

During the design of the preliminary architecture of Alexandria, we have made several decisions regarding the functionality of each module and its interconnection with the rest of the system. Some of the design choices were for simplicity and the others were based on our past experience. The performance evaluation of the prototype and the testbed will surely change the architecture of Alexandria. Here, we briefly discuss the aspects of the system that we will be monitoring closely and that may lead to further refinements of the design.

• How to ensure locality of access and minimize remote accesses?

• How to set up user profiles for precomputing queries and prefetching data?

• How to browse efficiently on remote data?

• How to integrate browsing both with storage and catalogue components?

• Where should facilities for data conversion be supported to deal with heterogeneity?

• How to support transparent interface over heterogeneous local and wide area networks?