Resource Discovery Among Collaborative Information Spaces inLarge, Decentralized Environments

互联网是一个强大的资源。它将全球数千个机构中的数百万个人连接起来，为文档、软件、数据、网络服务和人员等重要的组织间资源共享提供了潜力。首席研究者（PI）设想了一种复杂的分布式协作范例，其中人们在跨管理边界的许多相互关联的个人之间完成任务并共享资源。本项目的研究将考虑三个问题：如何设计可用于国内或国际网络的资源发现算法，如何提供支持搜索的算法而不强加对资源空间组织的人为约束，以及如何构建在协议、信息格式和组织结构方面需要最低程度的全球管理协议的系统。为了回答这些问题，PI将探索一个高度分散的架构来支持资源发现。该研究强调系统和网络问题，涉及登记和维护称为“视图”的分布式结构的分发和复制；视图内容的安全性；易于创建和更新视图；以及查找资源的便利性。

The Internet is a powerful resource. Interconnecting millions of individuals at thousands of institutions worldwide, it offers potential for significant inter-organizational sharing of resources, such as documents, software, data, network services, and people. The principal investigator (PI) envisions a sophisticated distributed collaboration paradigm where people accomplish tasks and share resources among many interrelated individuals across administrative borders. The research in this project will consider three questions: how can one design resource discovery algorithms that scale for use in national or international networks, provide algorithms to support searches without imposing artificial constraints on the resource space organization, and build systems that require a minimal level of global administration agreement on protocols, information formats, and organizational structures. To answer these questions, the PI will explore a highly decentralized architecture for supporting resource discovery. The research emphasizes systems and networking issues, involving distribution and replication for registering and maintaining distributed structures, called "views"; security of view contents; ease of creating and updating views; and ease of searching for resources.