Chapter 8. P2P Data Formats and Interchange


by Michael Abbott

In This Chapter

  • Current Representations of Metadata

  • XML and Metadata

  • XML in P2P Systems: Applications

  • Searching Across Peers

The World Wide Web (WWW) is evolving from a platform that delivers information to people into a platform for distributing information among different network hosts. One critical component of the WWW that is inhibiting this transformation is the weak support for metadata and information exchange semantics. Indeed, many Web sites use the <TITLE> or <META> tags embedded in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) to describe the content of the page, but this approach is awkward at best, and the semantics of the tags are rarely supported. This lack of metadata infrastructure for WWW documents increases the difficulty of searching for content, and has driven the creation of companies like Google to address some of these problems.

In the P2P domain, the issue is of great importance, as the capability to discover other peers with a particular piece of knowledge or content is critical to P2P infrastructure. To address this challenge, the WWW Consortium's (W3C) metadata vision is captured within the concept of a Semantic Web, wherein all content on the Web has metadata that describes it. There is no way to enumerate all the metadata tags that could possibly exist, so solutions such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF) have been adopted to address the Semantic Web challenge. This chapter will explore the role of metadata in various computing architectures, including n-tier and P2P frameworks now and moving forward.



JavaT P2P Unleashed
JavaT P2P Unleashed
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2002
Pages: 209

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