DrWeb's Domain has an entry about Lionshare, a project at Penn State to develop an authenticated P2P file-sharing application/network for access to digital collections.
From the Lionshare website:
The LionShare P2P project is an effort to facilitate legitimate file-sharing among individuals and educational institutions around the world. By using Peer to Peer (P2P) technology and incorporating features such as authentication, directory servers, and owner controlled sharing of files, LionShare promises secure file-sharing capabilities for the easy exchange of image collections, video archives, large data collections, and other types of academic information. In addition to authenticated file-sharing capabilities, LionShare will also provide users with resources for organizing, storing, and retrieving digital files.
Here's a blurb from Open Access News (who got it from Chronicle of Higher Education, a subscription site):
Researchers at Pennsylvania State University at University Park plan to unveil today free software that attempts to turn the peer-to-peer technology often used by music pirates into a tool for professors to legitimately share large data sets, high-resolution images from their research, and other educational files. The software -- called LionShare -- will be released at a meeting of members of Internet2, the high-speed networking consortium. And it will be made available to colleges by the end of September, according to Michael J. Halm, senior strategist for Penn State's Teaching and Working With Technology office. The software, financed in part by a $1.1-million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, was about two years in the making. A number of college officials have awaited LionShare's release because the program could help professors establish their own online reserves. It allows users to search one another's digital collections of documents, images, and other academic material and view specific files....Professors can use the software to make files available only to students registered for their courses, for example. And users can organize their own digital collections by affixing keyword descriptions, known as metadata, to individual items.
The project is looking at using Shibboleth, a project from Internet2 MACE group (Middleware Architecture Committee for Education), to provide federated P2P while maintaining security, user identity and information.
There are interesting similarities with this application and the Stanford's LOCKSS application. Each take the concept of replication (many copies) to new heights. Though Lionshare seems to be heading towards community tagging. Cool.
Link: http://lionshare.its.psu.edu/main/
Posted by Paul H at September 23, 2005 10:26 PM
