Colloc - A Replication Engine for Peer-to-Peer Content Management in Large-Scale Distributed Systems

The term open content characterizes published material that can be freely copied or modified, by analogy with the well-know open source movement; the terms free or copyleft content are also sometimes used. Open content material is often created collaboratively over the Internet and improved iteratively. There exists a wide range of open content projects varying in scope, community size, collaborative process, etc. Typical examples are the Wikipedia free encyclopedia (www.wikipedia.org) and the Linux Documentation Project (www.tldp.org). This diversity suggests that no single collaborative environment could support all communities. This project aims at designing and implementing a collaborative content management engine for peer-to-peer communities exhibiting the characteristics sketched above. These characteristics clearly suggest that adaptive replication mechanisms should be at the heart of such an engine. More specifically, the engine should fulfill two goals: (a) dynamically placing information according to demand, and (b) accommodating dynamic changes in availability of resources. The project is a joint effort between the Universita della Svizzera italiana and the University of Lausanne (UNIL).