PeerSDI: A peer-to-peer information dissemination system

Selective dissemination of information (SDI) is a powerful mechanism to retrieve information in wide-area networks. With selective information dissemination, users submit continuous queries to the server, which collects new documents from information sources, matches the documents against the queries, and notifies the users with their desired information. On the other hand, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing is gaining more and more attention from both academia and industrial community for its potential to reconstruct current distributed applications on the Internet with inherent advantages, such as scalability, cost sharing and autonomy. This paper presents the PeerSDI information dissemination system, which combines the effective mechanism of SDI with Peer-to-Peer computing paradigm. PeerSDI supports distributed and scalable content-based information filtering and dissemination and makes SDI mechanism available on existing structured P2P networks. Our discussion focuses on textual documents dissemination, however the solution is also suitable for dissemination of multimedia resources.