The project is an attempt to build general distributed data objects framework that facilitates using data from many heterogeneous data sources. In the high-level overview, a system administrator specifies the general configuration of data objects (object names along with attributes, data mappings and locations). Nodes connecting to the system provide data in the form defined above.
Even though the system physically consists of many independent nodes, logically it can be considered to be one big metasystem. Users willing to use the system connect to any of nodes and can query for any data which is available at any physical location.
Initial implementation of the system is being developed using the H2O metacomputing framework.
The research in this area is still in the initial stage. During further investigation we will investigate such areas as fault tolerance, dynamic reconfiguration, background/continuous queries and data synchronization issues in dynamic environments.
List of selected publications:

• Pawel Jurczyk and Li Xiong, DObjects: Enabling Distributed Data Services for Metacomputing Platforms (Demo), VLDB '08 (to appear)
• Pawel Jurczyk, Li Xiong and Vaidy Sunderam, DObjects: Enabling Distributed Data Services for Metacomputing Platforms, ICCS '08 Best Paper Award

Question-Answer portals such as Naver and Yahoo! Answers are quickly becoming rich sources of knowledge on many topics which are not well served by general web search engines. Unfortunately, the quality of the submitted answers is uneven, ranging from excellent detailed answers to snappy and insulting remarks or even advertisements for commercial content. Furthermore, user feedback for many topics is sparse, and can be insufficient to reliably identify good answers from the bad ones. Hence, estimating the authority of users is a crucial task for this emerging domain, with potential applications to answer ranking, spam detection, and incentive mechanism design.
The research resulted in the following publications:

• Pawel Jurczyk and Eugene Agichtein, HITS on Question Answer Portals: an Exploration of Link Analysis for Author Ranking (poster), ACM SIGIR International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), 2007
• Pawel Jurczyk and Eugene Agichtein, Discovering Authorities in Question Answer Communities by Using Link Analysis (poster), Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), 2007

H2O is Java-based, component-oriented, lightweight resourcesharing platform for metacomputing. It allows deployment ofservices into container not only by container owners, but by anyauthorized clients or third parties. As a communication mechanism,H2O uses RMIX that is interoperable and extensible communicationlibrary. JXTA technology is a set of open protocols that allowsany connected device on a network to communicate and collaboratein P2P manner.

The main goal of this work is to build a uniform globalcomputational network using H2O distributed computing frameworkand JXTA P2P technology. This computational network will giveusers new possibilities in building and utilizing of distributedcomputing systems, namely H2O kernels behind firewalls will beaccessible and group management in JXTA will bring us apossibility of creating virtual groups of kernels, which enablesdynamic ad-hoc created collaborations.

The research resulted in the following publications:

• Pawel Jurczyk, Maciej Golenia, Maciej Malawski, Dawid Kurzyniec, Marian Bubak, Vaidy Sunderam, A System for Distributed Computing Based on H2O and JXTA, in: Bubak, M., Turala, M., Wiatr, K. (Eds.), Proceedings of Cracow Grid Workshop - CGW'04, December 13-15 2004, ACC-Cyfronet UST, 2005, Krakow, pp. 257-268.
• Pawel Jurczyk, Maciej Golenia, Maciej Malawski, Dawid Kurzyniec, Marian Bubak, Vaidy Sunderam, Enabling Remote Method Invocations inPeer-to-Peer Environments: RMIX over JXTA, in PPAM 2005, Poznan, Poland, 2005.

This research was also the subject of my M.S Thesis: Peer-to-Peer computing with H2O and JXTA.