"Jack Lang" <fw23 at dial.pipex.com> wrote:
> It seems to me that one of the things you are doing is replacing a
> routing/physical source address with a content-type descriptor. Now this
> raises a number of issues:
> 1. A strong convention is needed for the descriptors, so that there is some
> chance of finding the content. I'm not sure that this can be left to chance,
> and maybe at least the top levels need to be defined - maybe something like
> the Dewey Decimal system.

Yes, a first stab at specifying some descriptor conventions can be found at:
http://freenet.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=key_const

> 2. Some way of finding out what content exists for a specific category, for
> example an intelligent search agent.

There is right now an ongoing argument about how to do searching. =)

> 3. Some form of discipline for the namespace. First-come-first-served has
> been a disaster for the web, and  some mechanism is needed to prevent abuse,
> for example by flooding all of a category with placeholder documents.

There are a couple of competing proposals here, either by using some type
of user confirmation/voting mechanism to decide which document has the
"right" to a name, or by a two-level naming system where a
human-understandable key leads to a set of references to approximately
unique non-understandable keys (corresponding to content hashes of
different documents, for example).

> 4. "distance" needs to take into account strength of the connection

This has been talked about a little, but there is also the problem that you
don't just want to go to the closest node to look for the data, you want to
go to the node which is close and is most likely to have the data.
Balancing these two issues is a problem.

> 5. Can streaming media be supported? If so how?

I don't see why not, in principle.  When an insert of a streamed file
reaches a node, it can make a note of it right away in its data store
(rather than wait until the file is complete).  If someone else requests it
while the file is still being read in, the request is fed out from the top
of the file which has already been saved.

Once the file is complete, of course, no alteration is necessary.  Clients
will just request it as usual and start interpreting it immediately as the
file arrives.

theo


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