DistriWiki: A Peer-to-Peer Wiki Network

Background

Wikis are popular Web sites on which users can edit the pages they read. Most famous among them is Wikipedia, a free and open online encyclopedia with thousands of users. Wikipedia is completely organized as a wiki, meaning that almost all of its pages have been created by users and can be changed by users.

Large, global wiki networks have technical limitations caused by the architecture of the World Wide Web. This project is expected to improve the performance and reliability of wiki networks.

Goals of this Project

DistriWiki provides a peer-to-peer wiki architecture, with which nodes communicate. Each node represents a set of wiki pages stored on a user's computer. Its main benefits are:

• improved performance
• improved reliability
• reduced bandwidth cost

The architecture has the capability to actively move information between computers; this is done in order to create redundant copies (for increased reliability), or in order to move resources closer to the location where they are being used (for increased performance).

The Prototype

A research prototype of a DistriWiki peer has been developed. The software is based on the JXTA peer-to-peer library and has a simple Gui for stand-alone use. A version that can be used as a Web proxy is planned.

Publication

Joseph Morris, Chris Lüer, DistriWiki: A Distributed Peer-to-Peer Wiki, 2007 International Symposium on Wikis (WikiSym), Montréal, 2007. PDF

Contact Information

Joseph Morris and Christian Lüer
Computer Science Department
Ball State University
Muncie, IN 47304
http://www.cs.bsu.edu/homepages/chl/P2PWiki/