Building a collaborative peer-to-peer wiki system on a structured overlay

International audienceThe ever growing request for digital information raises the need for content distribution architectures providing high storage capacity, data availability and good performance. While many simple solutions for scalable distribution of quasi-static content exist, there are still no approaches that can ensure both scalability and consistency for the case of highly dynamic content, such as the data managed inside wikis. We propose a peer-to-peer solution for distributing and managing dynamic content, that combines two widely studied technologies: Distributed Hash Tables (DHT) and optimistic replication. In our “universal wiki” engine architecture (UniWiki), on top of a reliable, inexpensive and consistent DHT-based storage, any number of front-ends can be added, ensuring both read and write scalability, as well as suitability for large-scale scenarios. The implementation is based on Damon, a distributed AOP middleware, thus separating distribution, replication, and consistency responsibilities, and also making our system transparently usable by third party wiki engines. Finally, UniWiki has been proved viable and fairly efficient in large-scale scenarios

Distributed Wikis: A Survey

International audienceSUMMARY "Distributed Wiki" is a generic term covering various systems, including "peer-to-peer wiki," "mobile wiki," "offline wiki," "federated wiki" and others. Distributed wikis distribute their pages among the sites of autonomous participants to address various motivations, including high availability of data, new collaboration models and different viewpoint of subjects. Although existing systems share some common basic concepts, it is often difficult to understand the specificity of each one, the underlying complexities or the best context in which to use it. In this paper, we define, classify and characterize distributed wikis. We identify three classes of distributed wiki systems, each using a different collaboration model and distribution scheme for its pages: highly available wikis, decentralized social wikis and federated wikis. We classify existing distributed wikis according to these classes. We detail their underlying complexities and social and technical motivations. We also highlight some directions for research and opportunities for new systems with original social and technical motivations