CONESYS - the COntent NEtwork SYStem

Abstract:

CONESYS is the Open Source COntent NEtwork SYStem for peer-to-peer content and knowledge management. In a content network, digital objects are free to move around and be replicated while they still remain accessible. With CONESYS, such content networks can be set up to improve availability and performance of Internet, Intranet, or Extranet services within or accross administrative domains. CONESYS offers a highly adaptive functionality to integrate legacy systems into a cross-server content and knowledge management infrastructure, but also to plugin new software modules and connectors into its framework.

An innovative technology allows CONESYS to decouple any digital object from the physical nodes and addressing schemes that carry them (e.g. URLs). This is called the Distributed Digital Objects (DDO) system, based on a kind of IP address combined with an arbitrary unique identifier for digital items. A CONESYS content network basically knows two kinds of nodes: content providers and content collectors. Content providers have some type of content they make available to the rest of the network. Content Collectors are looking for a piece of content which they harvest from content providers. Potentially, any content provider can also act as a content collector, thus allowing for a wide range of network topologies, especially peer-to-peer computing.

The network is self-configuring: Initial parameters defined in XML description files are being distributed between content collectors and providers similar to the DNS system. New content nodes will be registered automatically to the network. Communication between servers participating in the content network is achieved by interoperable or native connectors provided by CONESYS (like SOAP, XML-RPC, Java RMI, Z39.50, OAI, etc.).

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