Section: New Software and Platforms

Active Data

Participants : Gilles Fedak [correspondant] , Anthony Simonet.

Functional Description

Active Data is a free software system that tracks the life cycle of data distributed across heterogeneous software and infrastructures.

As the volume of data grows exponentially, the management of these data becomes more complex in proportion. A key point is to handle the complexity of the Data Life Cycle, i.e. the various operations performed on data: transfer, archiving, replication, deletion, etc. Indeed, data-intensive applications span over a large variety of devices and e-infrastructures which implies that many systems are involved in data management and processing. Active Data is a new approach to automate and improve the expressiveness of data management applications. Active Data consists of a formal model that captures the essential data life cycle stages and properties : creation, deletion, replication, derivation, transient unavailability, uniform naming, and many more. Active Data provides a programming model that simplify the development of data life cycle management applications. Active Data allows code execution at each stage of the data life cycle: routines provided by programmers are executed when a set of events (creation, replication, transfer, deletion) happen to any data.

• URL: http://active-data.gforge.inria.fr