A Peer-to-Peer-based Distributed Link Service Architecture

Due to the ever increasing number of different digital media types that we use in our daily work, it is no longer sufficient to manage them in an isolated way but desirable to define associations across the media boundaries. While cross-media information systems enable associations between digital and physical information, there is often a lack of support for flexible authoring and sharing of these associations (links) as, for example, required in meeting situations. We present a solution for this kind of ad-hoc information exchange and collaborative authoring in cross-media environments which is based on a link service in combination with peer-to-peer technologies. Our goal was not to replicate hypermedia documents based on peer-to-peer technology, but rather to use a distributed link service architecture to enable the sharing of link metadata in collaborative information spaces. To avoid information overload and guarantee a certain link quality in these highly dynamic information environments, we adopt some general mechanisms for user and link rating.