CONESYS - The COntent NEtwork SYStem

Sandro Zic

CONESYS is the Open Source COntent NEtwork SYStem for peer-to-peer content and knowledge management. In a content network, digital objects are free to move
around and be replicated while they still remain accessible. With CONESYS,
such content networks can be set up to improve availability and performance
of Internet, Intranet, or Extranet services within or accross administrative
domains. CONESYS offers a highly adaptive functionality to integrate legacy
systems into a cross-server content and knowledge management infrastructure,
but also to plugin new software modules and connectors into its framework.

Thus CONESYS is useful on the one hand for companies with several branch
offices that need to connect their information pools, on the other hand, it
can also exchange data between several applications residing on one host or
one LAN.

An innovative technology allows CONESYS to decouple any digital object from
the physical nodes and addressing schemes that carry them (e.g. URLs). This
is called the Distributed Digital Objects (DDO) system, based on a kind of IP
address combined with an arbitrary unique identifier for digital items. A
CONESYS content network basically knows two kinds of nodes: content providers
and content collectors. Content providers have some type of content they make
available to the rest of the network. Content Collectors are looking for a
piece of content which they harvest from content providers. Potentially, any
content provider can also act as a content collector, thus allowing for a
wide range of network topologies, especially peer-to-peer computing.

The network is self-configuring: Initial parameters defined in XML description
files are being distributed between content collectors and providers similar
to the DNS system. New content nodes will be registered automatically to the
network. Communication between servers participating in the content network
is achieved by interoperable or native connectors provided by CONESYS (like
SOAP, XML-RPC, Java RMI, Z39.50, OAI, etc.).

The first stable release of CONESYS is scheduled for mid April. More
information on CONESYS can be found at http://www.conesys.net.