RE: Freenet, distributed search and simple RDF queries

[freed from spam trap -ralph]

Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2001 13:37:43 -0500 (EST)
From: "Bill de hOra" <bill@dehora.fsnet.co.uk>
To: "Dan Brickley" <Daniel.Brickley@bristol.ac.uk>,
        "www-rdf-interest" <www-rdf-interest@w3.org>,
        "tech" <tech@freenetproject.org>
Message-ID: <DCEBKOHMHCKKIAAPKLLMCEOICAAA.bill@dehora.fsnet.co.uk>

Dan,

: Consider a second example. Instead of two Freenet keys that identify
: documents, one of which is a critique of another, we have a document in
: Freenet that is a critique of another resource with an http: URI.
Regardless,
: Freenet can still be used to look up metadata pointing one towards
: critiques. This seems to fit with some of the free speech agenda often
: associated with Freenet, and suggests a particularly robust form of Web
: annotation. Nothing in the scenario below particularly spins on party
: A's document living in Freenet; it might just be a traditional HTTP
: website.

Well, any time I look at freenet, I see place to find the rdf description
services you wrote about once upon a time. Putting direct metadata into
freenet
would be silly, but putting pointers to the places that do would be useful.
That
might help in the short term with dereferencing metadata (anything freeenet
points is by convention not just a namespace URI, it holds downloadable
information type stuff).


: Hmm... I've almost convinced myself this'll just work. But it all sounds
: far too easy. Someone please point out the fatal flaw...

Here's a strawman flaw: predicating that clients and servers are a fundamental
part of web architecture. Clients/server isn't scaling so well wrt people want
from a global information network. It's also a politically and socially dicey
proposition if you believe (like Lawrence Lessig, say) that distribution (and
not information) is power.

Using freenet as you describe in your use case sounds like a good go at a
join/discovery system for metadata. But only until such a point as collective
smartness or serendipty (I'll take either, the sooner the better) figures
out a
better way to do evolve web architecture out of hardcoded clients and servers.
Maybe freenet and gnutella *are* the first serious crack at this issue, I
don't
know.

[Aside: how far away are we from someone being sued for libel over their
metadata?]

regards, (with my marxist hat on, since it's a sunday :)
-Bill de hOra

Received on Monday, 5 February 2001 08:25:05 UTC