Until recently, most data integration techniques involved central components, e.g., global schemas, to enable transparent access to heterogeneous databases. Today, however, with the democratization of tools facilitating knowledge elicitation in machine-processable formats, one cannot rely on global, centralized schemas anymore as knowledge creation and consumption are getting more and more dynamic and decentralized. Peer Data Management Systems (PDMS) provide an answer to this problem by eliminating the central semantic component and considering instead compositions of local, pair-wise mappings to propagate queries from one database to the others.

In the following, we give an overview of various PDMS approaches; all the approaches proposed so far make the implicit assumption that all schema mappings used to reformulate a query are correct. This obviously cannot be taken as granted in typical PDMS settings where mappings can be created (semi) automatically by independent parties. Thus, we propose a totally decentralized, efficient message passing scheme to automatically detect erroneous schema mappings in a PDMS. Our scheme is based on a probabilistic model where we take advantage of transitive closures of mapping operations to confront local belief on the correctness of a mapping against evidences gathered around the network. We show that our scheme can be efficiently embedded in any PDMS and provide an evaluation of our techniques on large sets of automatically-generated schemas.