[p2p-hackers] Bitzi (was Various identifier choices)

[Gordon Mohr]

Brandon Wiley writes:
> My preference is certainly for an RDF dump via HTTP. I'm going to be
> demoing at O'Reilly my P2P searching technology. It works by gathering RDF
> databases of metadata. It was originally developed for Freenet, but I'm
> working on integration with MojoNation and BitTorrent. I'd like to add
> Bitzi as another system which can be searched in order to find URLs to
> content in various networks. If Bitzi provides a straight RDF dump of its
> whole database then it can act simply as a catalog source and searching
> can be done in my application. 

The dump will grow quite large; how often would you expect to 
schedule full-fetches (or delta-fetches)?

Do you have any example RDF dumps which would demonstrate the
fields and format conventions you'd find most useful? 

(We won't invent if there's already good precedents to mimic,
and we could crank out an initial dump in very short order if
it'd help give you something better to demo at O'R-P2P.)

> If Bitzi provides an implementation of the
> searching API either via the CGI version of the API or the XML-RPC version
> then it can actually be used as a drop-in replacement for the search
> engine part of the application.

What is your dominant search model? Free text across all credible 
metadata? Field-specific with things like scalar value comparisons 
(e.g. "128 <= bitrate <= 196")? Both?

> I've very interested in the interoperability of systems and I think it
> would be great to have a centralized metadata catalog as well as the
> decentralized catalogs which can exist in MN and BT. Centralized catalogs
> have distinct advantages at times. Bitzi is in a fine position to serve
> that role. All that really needs to be done to get things started is to
> provider an RDF serialization of the database via HTTP.

And that's exactly the role we'd like to play -- being the 
steward for cataloguing tasks which are easiest to do with a 
shared, central reference point, while letting the metadata
itself travel whatever chaotic paths make the most sense to
system developers and users.

- Gojomo