A distributed catalog for digitized cultural heritage

Abstract

Peer-to-peer networks have emerged recently as a flexible decentralized solution to handle large amount of data without the use of high-end servers. In this paper we present a distributed catalog built up on an overlay network called "Synapse". The Synapse protocol allows interconnection of different overlay networks each of them being an abstraction of a "community" of virtual providers. Data storage and data retrieval from different kind of content providers (i.e. libraries, archives, museums, universities, research centers, etc.) can be stored inside one catalog. We illustrate the concept based on the Synapse protocol: a catalog for digitized cultural heritage of Serbia.