The Webdamlog System Managing Distributed Knowledge on the Web

TL;DR

WebdamLog is a high-level, declarative language designed for managing distributed data and knowledge across autonomous web peers, featuring delegation capabilities and efficient implementation.

Contribution

The paper introduces WebdamLog, a novel datalog-like language with delegation for distributed knowledge management, and demonstrates its usability and efficiency through user studies and experiments.

Findings

Users can quickly and accurately write WebdamLog programs.

WebdamLog can be implemented efficiently on existing datalog engines.

The system supports effective distribution of data and knowledge across peers.

Abstract

We study the use of WebdamLog, a declarative high-level lan- guage in the style of datalog, to support the distribution of both data and knowledge (i.e., programs) over a network of au- tonomous peers. The main novelty of WebdamLog compared to datalog is its use of delegation, that is, the ability for a peer to communicate a program to another peer. We present results of a user study, showing that users can write WebdamLog programs quickly and correctly, and with a minimal amount of training. We present an implementation of the WebdamLog inference engine relying on the Bud dat- alog engine. We describe an experimental evaluation of the WebdamLog engine, demonstrating that WebdamLog can be im- plemented efficiently. We conclude with a discussion of ongoing and future work.