Work

To federate or not to federate, that is the query

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: The adjective “federated” is widely used in computer science, yet with diverging meanings that often lead toconfusion, especially in interdisciplinary discussions, collaborative authorship or when building research consortia.Originally rooted in political theory, federation denotes cooperation between autonomous entities withoutloss of sovereignty. Recently, however, “federated” now also describes architectures ranging from distributedquerying and data integration to machine learning, research infrastructures, and collaborative knowledge or dataecosystems.Motivated by recurring ambiguity in discussions among co-authors, this poster tries to distinguish prominentuses of the adjective “federated”. (e.g. federated SPARQL querying, federated learning, federated data warehousing,national initiatives such as the Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN), and the Wikimedia ecosystem). Wereview where these concepts overlap, where they diverge, and whether they should be treated as distinct notions.By making implicit assumptions explicit, we try to bring some clarity and hopefully practical guidance onwhen and how the term “federated” should be used

Source: Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19154714

Authors: Waagmeester, Andra, Boonstra, Machteld J, Österle, Sabine, Pintscher, Lydia, Sebastian, van der Voort

Institutions: Amsterdam University Medical Centers, SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics

Language: English

Topic: Semantic Web and Ontologies

Subfield: Artificial Intelligence

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: green

OpenAlex ID: W7140028116

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