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Peer-to-Peer Computing >> Meeting the P2P Challenge
1/31/2005
“What sets LionShare apart from pretty much every other approach to date is the fact that there’s a real sense of accountability here,” says Halm, adding that LionShare servers provide a persistent mirror for content, to ensure that designated files can be available for sharing when a personal peer (such as an instructor’s laptop) is disconnected. “We’re trying to teach responsibility without relying on heavy-handed types of technology.”
As Halm explains, the LionShare effort developed out of PSU’s Visual Image User Study (www.libraries.psu.edu/vius), a 26-month project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and tasked to assess how academic communities use digital images for teaching research and service. The study, conducted between 2001 and 2003, determined that a new application would need to provide more flexible, user-controlled tools, and expanded capabilities for the discovery, management, and sharing of multimedia files. To bring these goals to life, LionShare partner organizations (including Internet2, Canada’s Simon Fraser University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology) decided to base their code on the Limewire 4.0 Open Source Project’s implementation of the widely utilized Gnutella P2P protocol. Because the LionShare application needs to perform many tasks beyond basic file search and retrieval, however, programmers are developing additional capabilities on top of the Gnutella protocol, to support the overall goals of the project.
Some of these additional capabilities will eventually facilitate interoperability between LionShare and other collaborative academic efforts such as Shibboleth (for more on Shibboleth, see “The Power of Who” in January Campus Technology; www.campus-technology.com/authentication). LionShare features international interoperability protocols that provide access to a growing mass of content stored in networks of institutional repositories at individual schools around the world (see “Book ’Em,” page 36). As Halm explains, LionShare 1.0 also will allow publishers to describe their resources using a relevant metadata schema, and will encourage searchers to query against these high-level classifications. This, he says, ultimately could enable a sharing of institutional knowledge that truly enhances the educational process across the board.
“If I’m a department head in entomology, who’s to say that I can’t create a departmental repository of all faculty publications for students to access and use as a resource?” he asks rhetorically. “When we finally use peer-to-peer technology the way it was designed to be used, the possibilities for improving the way we approach education today really are without boundaries.”
Matt Villano is senior contributing editor of this publication.
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