Advanced Data Management This research group is directed by Prof. Manuel Rodriguez-Martinez and is concentrating on the development of GaiaNET, a new decentralized architectural framework for building database middleware systems for a CIP environment to provide applications with the abstractions of data services, computational services, and software services that can be automatically combined by the middleware system itself to support complex scientific queries. GaiaNET is a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) system since any service can supply its functionality on behalf of others. Moreover, peer sites exchange metadata (encoded with XML) about resources (e.g. databases, CPU time, software) that they have discovered, and this permits resources to be added or removed from the system without central control. This group has an MS graduate student fully supported by the WALSAIP project.