Genre supports the deployment of distributed servers in an opportunistic and incremental fashion. Genre servers can incrementally incorporate new data sources and hence grow to support the needs of individuals, groups, or large organizations. Individuals can access, organize, and perform interactive analysis on the organized information. Furthermore, a set of users can federate their information space using an appointed information center. Using the same learning approach described above, Genre will assist the users in creating parameterized scripts that can be executed on the user s behalf.
Genre uses an opportunistic strategy for improving performance of distributed queries.
First, query modulation is based on statistical information collected about distributed query performance over the network. Second, views are materialized in the federating information centers so that queries created within an exploration session can be answered based on these views rather than having to return to the sources. The programmability of Genre servers is used to deal with issues that arise in merging task contexts. Parameterization of these scripts allows the server to deal with a much broader case of schema heterogeneity than otherwise possible. Additionally, as more and more domain vocabularies are standardized using XML and RDF, Genre will apply the XML namespace approach to manage schema heterogeneity.