Abstract
An increasing number of online applications operate on data from disparate, and often wide-spread, data sources. This paper studies the design of a system for the automated monitoring of on-line data sources. In this system a number of ad-hoc data warehouses, which maintain client-specified views, are interposed between clients and data sources. We present a model of coherence, referred to here as slacker coherence, to address the freshness problem in the context of pull-based protocols. We experimentally examine various techniques for estimating update rates and polling adaptively. We also look at the impact on the coherence model performance of the request scheduling algorithm at the source.