Distributed Datalog Revisited

The emergence of Web 2.0 and social network applications has enabled more and more users to share sensitive information over the Web. The information they manipulate has many facets: personal data (e.g., pictures, movies, music, contacts, emails), social data (e.g., annotations, recommendations, contacts), localization information (e.g., bookmarks), access information (e.g., login, keys), web services (e.g., legacy data, search engines), access rights, ontologies, beliefs, time and provenance information, etc. The tasks they perform are very diverse: search, query, update, authentication, data extraction, etc. We believe that all this should be viewed in the holistic context of the management of a distributed knowledge base. Furthermore, we believe that datalog (and its extensions) forms the sound formal basis for representing such information and supporting these tasks. In this paper, we revisit datalog with this goal in mind. The focus of the presentation is on the formal extension of the model of distributed datalog and does not consider the implementation or the evaluation of the corresponding system [8].