Supporting Ad Hoc Resource Sharing on the Web: A Peer-to-Peer Approach to Hypermedia Link Services

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Description/Abstract

The key element to support ad hoc resource sharing on the Web is to discover resources of interest. The hypermedia paradigm provides a way of overlaying a set of resources with additional information in the form of links to help people find other resources. However, existing hypermedia approaches primarily develop mechanisms to enable resource sharing in a fairly static, centralized way. Recent developments in distributed computing, on the other hand, introduced peer-to-peer (P2P) computing that is notable for employing distributed resources to perform a critical function in a more dynamic and ad hoc scenario. We investigate the feasibility and potential benefits of bringing together the P2P paradigm with the concept of hypermedia link services to implement ad hoc resource sharing on the Web. This is accomplished by utilizing a web-based Distributed Dynamic Link Service (DDLS) as a test bed and addressing the issues arising from the design, implementation and enhancement of the service. Our experimental result reveals the behavior and performance of the semantics-based resource discovery in DDLS, and demonstrates that the proposed enhancing technique for DDLS, topology re-organization, is appropriate and efficient.