The SIGIR peer-to-peer information retrieval workshop

Abstract

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems have emerged as a popular way to share huge volumes of data. The P2P paradigm holds many promises: it fits naturally with the Internet, the universal knowledge and service exchange medium; it favors scalability, by allowing the seamless plugging of data, services and computational resources into the global system; it increases system resilience, by avoiding unique points of failures; and it can speed up global access by distributing the indexing and query processing tasks to multiple computing nodes. However, retrieval methods for P2P systems are still in their infancy. P2P networks are prone to congestion when messages are not routed intelligently. Many of the most effective routing or data placement methods developed recently rely on relatively simple retrieval methods and homogeneous network environments.