Issues in virtual database support for decentralized knowledge discovery

Knowledge discovery processes require powerful computational resources, and specific expertise to extract knowledge from large amounts of data. Data, resources, and expertise are now available on the Internet. Thus, decentralization of knowledge discovery processes seems a viable solution. However, effective use of the Internet calls for technologies which allow distributed resources to be flexibly combined, and their activities coordinated.In a seminal paper, we introduced the concept of Decentralized Knowledge Discovery. In this paper, we discuss issues concerning the decentralized execution of knowledge discovery activities. We show that data and computational resources can be assembled together through the Internet to build a virtual database for Decentralized Knowledge Discovery. In particular, we point out which issues are relevant (and must be investigated) for building such systems