The MINERVA1 Project: Towards Collaborative Search in Digital Libraries Using Peer-to-Peer Technology

We consider the problem of collaborative search across a large number of digital libraries and query routing strategies in a peer-to-peer (P2P) environment. Both digital libraries and users are equally viewed as peers and, thus, as part of the P2P network. Our system provides a versatile platform for a scalable search engine combining local index structures of autonomous peers with a global directory based on a distributed hash table (DHT) as an overlay network. Experiments with the MINERVA prototype testbed study the benefits and costs of P2P search for keyword queries.