[p2p-hackers] Paradigma Question: DHT's or Small World?

[Alexander Löser]

Thank you very much in sharing this discussion!!  You gave me very valuable comments on
the design question to choose either small world or DHT's.  If I understood your
arguments right, small world should be the preferred paradigm, if the system design
requires the following (hard or soft) features:

(Hard features)
Churn: The system should support a high churn rate of peers/high churn rate of objects:
By the way, since these hypotheses are intuitive but unproved, does anybody know a
theoretical or experimental work, that proofed them? Furthermore, maybe this question is
a bit naive, but what exactly is high?

Complex queries: The system allows a user to pose complex queries, e.g. several keywords,
or if I speak about meta data annotated documents more than one (semantic) predicate per
query.

(Soft features)
Profile locality: One peer maps to one user. Probably a user is not interested or willing
to transfer it's local profile to a global index but likes to keep it locally, e.g. for
anonymity or to delete entries.

Popularity:  If most of the searches go for popular objects, small world may be the first
choice. For example, this is the case for most music sharing networks.

Community search: Depending on the shortcut creation strategies between friends on a
small world network, the small world paradigm supports the data sharing graph between
people with similar interests. By the way: Does it also support similar semantics?

What kind of application scenario suits to this requirements? I think of a networked
desktop search application. Similar to Gnutella, some people publish some of its
documents, most don't. Some of them are annotated by meta data, probably with the same
vocabulary or within the same ontology, some not. Users pose keyword queries, similar in
a single desktop search engine.  Queries either match the documents filename, folder or
(if any) documents meta data.

Would be the small world paradigm support such a system?

Alex
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  Alexander Löser
  Technische Universität Berlin
  http://cis.cs.tu-berlin.de/~aloeser/
  office : +49- 30-314-25551
  fax    : +49- 30-314-21601
  skype  : hallo.alex
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