Alban Galland is a PhD Student working in the Webdam ERC Project team (INRIA Saclay—Ile-de-France and Laboratoire Spécification et Vérification of ENS Cachan). His advisor is Serge Abiteboul.

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 we manipulate has many facets : data, annotations, localization (e.g., bookmarks), login and keys, access rights, ontologies, beliefs, time and provenance information, etc. To find data, one typically has to perform a number of complex tasks such as search/query, authentication, data extraction. More and more, we also want to control how our personal data is used.

We will argue that all this should be viewed in the holistic context of a distributed knowledge base. More precisely, we use extensions of distributed datalog. Logical statements are used to capture these different facets of information that are typically considered in isolation. Knowledge can be communicated, replicated, queried, updated, and monitored. The fact that we use a formal model allows complex reasoning for searching information, within a rich mix of very different scenarios ranging from information in centralized servers to massively distributed, from fully trusted to untrusted, and providing encrypted or clear information, which is the reality of today’s Web.