PeerSum: a summary service for P2P applications

PurposeThe goal of this paper is to contribute to the development of both data localization and description techniques in P2P systems.Design/methodology/approachThe approach consists of introducing a novel indexing technique that relies on linguistic data summarization into the context of P2P systems.FindingsThe cost model of the approach, as well as the simulation results have shown that the approach allows the efficient maintenance of data summaries, without incurring high traffic overhead. In addition, the cost of query routing is significantly reduced in the context of summaries.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper has considered a summary service defined on the APPA's architecture. Future works have to study the extension of this work in order to be generally applicable to any P2P data management system.Practical implicationsThis paper has mainly studied the quantitative gain that could be obtained in query processing from exploiting data summaries. Future works aim to implement this technique on real data (not synthetic) in order to study the qualitative gain that can be obtained from approximately answering a query.Originality/valueThe novelty of the approach shown in the paper relies on the double exploitation of the summaries in P2P systems: data summaries allow for a semantic‐based query routing, and also for an approximate query answering, using their intentional descriptions.