Towards a Peer2Peer World-Wide-Web for the Broadband-enabled User Community

Constantine Mantratzis, Mehmet Orgun
Proceedings of the 2004 ACM workshop on Next-generation residential broadband challenges

Overview

The proposed system is to create peer-to-peer archive of the World Wide Web. It creates the possibility to retrieve “discontinued” web documents by searching the web browser's caches of other nodes in the archive network.

Sharing archived information comes with some issues. First, information structuring, the location of documents changes continuously. Second, resource versioning, what is the most recent version and can be earlier versions be retrieved. Third, legal issues, how to handle with copyrighted material. Fourth, personal data security, not every web document that is retrieved by the user should be added to the archive.

For each archived object the original URL, a time stamp, a geo-stamp and the local filename are stored. A time stamp allows a comparison between the local copy and the original remote document. Secondly, the time stamp provides versioning information. The geo-stamp allows customized documents for a certain groups of users based on their geographical location. Searching the archive network is similar to a search in Gnutella.