Alessandro Yoshi Polliotti 1 / 13 TERENA Networking Conference 2005 Biblioteca d'Alessandria: A Peer-to-peer Network for Scholar Knowledge Exchange Terena Networking Conference 2005 A.Y. Polliotti, A. Tugnoli, M. Simoncini, S. Mangiaracina

Alessandro Yoshi Polliotti 2 / 13 TERENA Networking Conference 2005 Knowledge flux Knowledge is not shared by researchers: it is a profitable business for publishers Estimates show that knowledge sharing is limited to about 10% of total scientific production The first bottleneck is a strong self censorship among researchers The second bottleneck is the chronic lack of funds The growing discomfort among researchers has brought to OAI (Open Archives Initiative) Started in 1999 and implemented in 2001 OAI is still mostly an unknown voluntary effort 100% P 2% OAI ~100% 10% 9% ??% R L ~90% of knowledge is lost Based on data from UNESCO Institute for Statistics and Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory

Alessandro Yoshi Polliotti 3 / 13 TERENA Networking Conference 2005 OAI Open Archives Initiative (OAI) develops and promotes interoperability solutions that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. Data Provider make their documents available to the public exposing their metadata through the OAI-PMH protocol (XML queries over HTTP) Harvester Harvest metadata from different Data Providers Service Provider use Harvesters to collect metadata from different Data Providers, then implements enhanced services over these metadata such as cross search, index, alert system, etc. BdA is both service provider and data provider OAI’ shortcomings the meaning of many metadata fields is not well defined archive fragmentation installation is above the skills of an average user

Alessandro Yoshi Polliotti 4 / 13 TERENA Networking Conference 2005 BdA Objectives Knowledge exchange To improve the accessibility To improve the speed of dissemination To increase the impact of papers and recognition of the authors To measure the excellence of a Research Institute through visibility of its scientific productivity (evaluation and branding) To stop certain bad habits! Strategy To provide Research Institutes with a tool, giving them a chance to handle and distribute their own content To promote an ethic of knowledge sharing between researchers to accelerate the transition to the new model To add a customizable tool to researchers' desktops, something useful for their daily work, not just for archiving purposes And to make it as user friendly as possible Installation, document submission, unified search archive and search engine

Alessandro Yoshi Polliotti 5 / 13 TERENA Networking Conference 2005 End user perspective Freescience (focus on single users) Allows to build simple personal digital archives Main features: Allows users to share, search and download full-text documents Direct communication via instant message Anyone can start using it with profit at once Archivemaker (focus on institutions, laboratories and power users) Allows to build structured, branded institutional archives Main features: Allows users to organize themselves in groups Allows groups to choose their sharing peers Allows groups to display their documents on web with a click Each group can be OAI-PMH compliant with a click

Alessandro Yoshi Polliotti 6 / 13 TERENA Networking Conference 2005 BdA architecture CC C C p2p network of Java based clients JBOSS application server TomcatBdA Enterprise Javabeans C C Web publishingOAI DPIndexerClient interface MySQL OAI Data Providers OAI Service Providers CC

Alessandro Yoshi Polliotti 7 / 13 TERENA Networking Conference 2005 BdA Architecture (continued) OAIPMH Search/Share … download OAI Search download

Alessandro Yoshi Polliotti 8 / 13 TERENA Networking Conference 2005 P2P File Sharing Detailed Metadata Every item in the system has a metadata Metadata contains: authors, abstract, keywords, doc. type, etc. Each metadata is timestamped with its insertion date Versioning support, collection support and more Each item is identified anywhere based on its unique SHA-1 hash P2P File Sharing based on metadata The BdA server acts like a BitTorrent tracker Current protocol allows multi source sequential download Future protocol will allow multi source random block download

Alessandro Yoshi Polliotti 9 / 13 TERENA Networking Conference 2005 P2P and firewalls Types of nodes in p2p network A) Nodes that have full access to the network B) Nodes that may only open outbound connections C) Nodes that may only open outbound connections on a limited range of ports, typically HTTP and FTP Node behaviour C nodes cannot connect to the BdA service unless the network administrator opens the necessary ports. If the number and quality of open ports is sufficient, they are equal to B nodes B nodes may connect to the BdA service however they may not download documents from each other Heuristics are being studied to allow B nodes to establish direct connections when possible A nodes may connect to the BdA service and transfer documents from and to nodes of type A and B Special A nodes may be setup by certain organizations to provide high availability and data replication

Alessandro Yoshi Polliotti 10 / 13 TERENA Networking Conference 2005 Search Engine Advanced Search based on metadata fields Permanent index is stored on BdA server database Boolean logic between fields one index for each of the most important metadata fields Handles complex search expressions boolean expressions with: parentheses boolean operator (AND,OR,XOR,NOT) wildcards (*, ?) and sentences “…” Transparently search on both BdA and OAI metadata

Alessandro Yoshi Polliotti 11 / 13 TERENA Networking Conference 2005 Groups and collaboration Groups A user may belong to one or more groups A user may publish an item in any one of his groups Groups are organized in a tree Groups may have sharing relationships among them Some users have administrative tasks for their groups Users 3 classes: User: may only submit new documents Editor: controls and validates visibility of metadata and documents Administrator: creates new groups, handles memberships, establishes sharing relationships with other groups

Alessandro Yoshi Polliotti 12 / 13 TERENA Networking Conference 2005 Web Publishing View document metadata from the web Based on groupware and sharing policies It shows all the metadata of a BdA Archive (i.e.: a group or a hierarchy of groups) Browse and Search functionality Two ways of using it Integrate it in existing web pages to display the metadata in any format (default is XML) directly on the Biblioteca d'Alessandria website (pages are in XHTML, obtained combining XML and an XSL style sheet)

Alessandro Yoshi Polliotti 13 / 13 TERENA Networking Conference 2005 Thank You! Web Site: Technical Staff: Information/Marketing: