Architecture and Methods for Flexible Content Management in Peer-to-Peer Systems

Abstract

At times when the IT manager's best friend is systems consolidation (which is a euphemism for centralisation), it may come somewhat as a surprise for you that this book investigates decentralisation in the context of content management systems. It may seem quite obvious that content will and should be managed by the party who creates and owns the content, and hence should be held in a-somewhat-centralised and managed location. However, over the past few years, we have been witnesses of some important trends and developments which call for novel ways of thinking about content management and maybe even broader, about computer systems in general.First, ongoing business globalization creates natural distribution of information at a corporate level, as well as decentralization of control over business resources and business processes. Changing alliances with partners require flexible architectures for content management that can adapt to changing constellations, roles, and access rights. Second, the need for outsourcing and resource efficiency has brought about concepts of virtualization, recently culminating in the cloud computing buzzword. Virtualization of content management services requires extremely scalable and flexible underlying information and communication architectures. These kinds of solutions are theoretically and practically impossible to implement based on centralised client-server architectures. Third, we are currently experiencing a dramatic shift in the roles of consumers in the Internet. The times have gone when quality content was only delivered by publishers and news agencies. Wikis and other Web 2.0 tools empower consumers to produce and publish their personal content. Twitter and citizen journalism may serve as two examples. To summarize, future content management solutions face challenges caused by business globalization, outsourcing and virtualisation, and the shift from consumers to prosumers.Peer-to-peer computing is a key computing paradigm to tackle these challenges. Far from being a new idea, the first generation of peer-to-peer networks date back to the origin of the Internet. The principle of packet switching which is implemented in the Internet Protocol is truly peer-to-peer: nodes in an IP network make routing decisions in a decentralized way, based on local information. This peer-to-peer architecture guarantees the enormous resilience and robustness of the Internet.About ten years ago, the second generation of peer-to-peer networks emerged: Internet file sharing. Decentrally organized systems and protocols like Napster and Gnutella were the basis of a scalable infrastructure for file exchange with the ability to provide acceptable quality of service for users looking for, e.g., mp3 files in the dynamic environment of the Internet. File sharing was followed by peer-to-peer IP telephony (Skype) and peer-to-peer solutions for the delivery of huge digital objects such as software updates (exemplified by BitTorrent).The third generation of peer-to-peer networks and applications employs p...

On Supporting Creative Interaction in Collaborative Systems: A Content Oriented Approach

“…We consider that documents are mere representations of content following a particular format (most often closed-source). A content management system is build from three main components [9] responsible with content a) collection, b) management, and c) publishing. Content collection consists in [10] i) authoring -create new content, ii) acquisition -get content from existing sources, iii) conversion -adapt content to system requirements, and iv) aggregation -split existing content in smaller pieces and augment them with metadata.…”