Peer-to-Peer

Chapter 13. Metadata

Rael Dornfest, O’Reilly Network, and Dan Brickley, ILRT and RDFWeb

Today’s Web is a great, big, glorious mess. Spiders, robots, screen-scraping, and plaintext searches are standard practices that indicate a desperate attempt to draw arbitrary distinctions between needles and hay. And they go only so far as the data we’ve taken the trouble to make available online.

Now peer-to-peer promises to turn your desktop, laptop, palmtop, and fridge into peers, chattering away with one another and making swaths of their data stores available online. Of course, if every single device on the network exposes even a small percentage of the resources it manages, it will exacerbate the problem by piling on more hay and needles in heaps. How will we cope with the sudden logarithmic influx of disparate data sources?

The new protocols being developed at breakneck speed for peer-to-peer applications also add to the mess by disconnecting data from the fairly bounded arena of the Web and the ubiquitous port 80. Loosening the hyperlinks that bind all these various resources together threatens to scatter hay and needles to the winds. Where previously we had application user interfaces for each and every information system, the Web gave us a single user interface—the browser—along with an organizing principle—the hyperlink—that allowed us to reach all the material, at least in theory. Peer-to-peer might undo all this good and throw us back into the dark ages of one application for each ...