Atlas

Atlas was formally ended in december 2010.

Atlas (ATLantic dAta Systems) was an INRIA project-team created by Patrick Valduriez in january 2004 between INRIA Rennes Bretagne Atlantique and the University of Nantes to work on complex data management in distributed systems. Until august 2009, Atlas was located at LINA, Nantes, involving researchers from two LINA teams: Atlas-GDD and Atlas-GRIM. In september 2009, Patrick Valduriez and part of Atlas moved to LIRMM, Montpellier, reporting to INRIA Sophia Antipolis - Méditerranée, and involving researchers from the IDC team at LIRMM.

In january 2011, the Zenith INRIA team, headed by Patrick Valduriez, has been created in Montpellier to work on scientific data management.

Presentation and objectives

Today's hard problems in data management go well beyond the traditional context of Database Management Systems (DBMS). These problems stem from significant evolutions of data, systems and applications. First, data have become much richer and more complex in formats (e.g., multimedia objects), structures (e.g., semi-structured documents), content e.g., incomplete or imprecise data), size (e.g., very large volumes), and associated semantics (e.g., metadata, code). The management of such data makes it hard to develop data-intensive applications and creates hard performance problems. Secondly, data management systems need to scale up to support large-distributed systems and deal with both fixed and mobile clients. In a highly distributed context, data sources are typically in high number, autonomous and heterogeneous, thereby making data integration difficult. Third, this combined evolution of data and systems gives rise to new, typically complex, applications with ubiquitous, on-line data access: collaborative content management (e.g. Wiki), online communities, social networks, virtual libraries, global catalogs, services for personal content management, etc.

The general problem can be summarized as complex data management in distributed systems. The Atlas project-team addresses this problem with the objective of designing and validating new solutions with significant advantages in functionality and performance. To tackle this objective, we now focus on data management in two large-scale distributed contexts: the web and P2P systems. In the context of the web, we consider information systems with autonomous participants (with heterogeneous data and different interests) and deal witht the problems of data integration, data classification and data access. In the context of P2P systems, we capitalize on our experience in developping the APPA system, with various data management services (replication, caching, queries, clustering, testing, etc.). A hard problem that we are starting to investigate is data privacy in P2P systems.

Industrial Contracts and Grants

• European STREP Grid4All (2006-2008)
• European IP Modelplex (2006-2009)
• European IP Modelware (2004-2006)
  
• Microsoft Research (2003-2006)
• IBM/Eclipse (2004-2005)
• RNTL Xwiki Concerto (2007-2009)
  
• RNTL OpenEmbeDD (2006-2009)
• Caroll Motor (2003-2006)
• RNTL Domus Videum (2002-2004)

International relations

• Saravá (P2P Data Sharing for Online Communities): "équipe associée 2009" with UFRJ, Brazil.
• Daad (Distributed computing with Autonomous Applications and Databases): CAPES-COFECUB project (2004-2007) with UFRJ, Brazil.
• Gridata : CNPQ-INRIA project (2005-2008) with PUC-Rio and UFRJ, Brazil.
  
• Mediasys (Multimedia system) : joint project with NII (National Institute of Informatics) in Tokyo.
• Multimedia STIC network (France-Maroco).