Scalable web page entanglement

We present a proxy-based system for augmenting the capabilities of the World Wide Web. Our system adds two-way association links and automatically removes these links when they break, while the existing web features only one-way links and lingering broken links. Several web augmentation systems have been developed in the past that add two-way links. Our key contribution is in terms of link management, which in our system is dynamic and completely automatic. Links between web pages are added and removed according to popular web traversal paths, freeing both page owners and readers from the burden of link creation and maintenance. Links can form between pages that do not link to each other at all, reflecting the fact that readers have associated these pages with each other—we described such pages as entangled. We use variations on common peer-to-peer techniques to build a scalable system out of a dynamic set of proxy peers. Proxy-to-proxy communication takes place entirely over http, ensuring compatibility with existing infrastructures. A working implementation of our system is available at http://tangle.sourceforge.net/