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Versioning for a location-independent Web: Stopping the shoulders of giants from rotting away |
What's missing: Why isn't the Web running over P2P? |
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Abstract |
Abstract |
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XXX |
File sharing systems allow you to download a file from any host |
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that has a copy. This saves bandwidth and increases availablity. |
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It would be nice if the Web worked the same way. However, |
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the hash-based addressing used in current file-sharing systems |
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does not allow documents to be updated. Most current P2P systems |
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have no facility to allow documents to be updated. |
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The systems that do (such as Freenet or OceanStore) |
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require state in the network for remembering |
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what the current version of a document is. |
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Thus, to keep a version of a Web page available, |
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it does not suffice to keep a copy on your computer; additionally, |
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the network has to remember the associated versioning information. |
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Extending OceanStore's *heartbeats*, we propose pointer records, |
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small, digitally signed files containing the identifier of a document, |
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a timestamp, and the hash of its current version. |
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Pointer records, like other files, can be downloaded from any peer |
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that has a copy. We can find all available pointer records for a document |
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through the same mechanism we use to find files in the peer-to-peer network |
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(for example, a distributed hashtable). This way, versions of a document |
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stay available as long as anybody keeps a copy. |
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.. raw:: latex |
.. raw:: latex |
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