- Jamie Callan, R. Krishnan, A. Montgomery. 2001. Peer-to-Peer Networks for Self-Organizing Virtual Communities. Abstract: 1 Project Summary Locating information on the Internet is a leading usability problem. Often desired information exists but is difficult to find. A method for addressing this problem in the physical world is to create a community. Communities tend to be organized around individuals with similar needs and characteristics. The commonalties within a community provide a context in which to evaluate retrieved information, increasing the chance that information will be relevant to the specific information need. For example, a biomedical researcher interested in locating current genetic research on Parkinson's Disease will have much different requirements than a patient who has been diagnosed with this disease. A search by each of these individuals using a general-purpose search engine would be treated in the same way, since syntactically the searches may be identical. However, if the biomedical researcher presents the request to other biomedical researchers the obtained information is likely to be much more relevant for his or her needs. Communities help preserve the information need context that is missing in general purpose search engines. Virtual communities have developed on the Internet, organized around particular topics, to serve purposes similar to more traditional communities in the physical world. The existing approaches to virtual community formation tend to be top down or ad-hoc. Virtual community hosting sites such as geocities.com do not support community formation based on content or type of information retrieved. Online communities must find an efficient means of locating individuals for which their information is highly valuable, or else only large-scale online communities will be practical. Recent failures of online business communities (e.g., Chemdex.com in the Life Sciences industry) have been attributed to the high costs of member acquisition. We propose a new approach to forming virtual communities that is based on peer-to-peer computer networks. Peer-to-peer computer networks enable members to communicate directly with one another. The communications links between network nodes form a dynamic network topology. Nodes are aware of which other nodes they are connected to, and nodes can disconnect from one part of the network (one set of nodes) and reconnect to another part of the network (another set of nodes) when it is convenient or advantageous to do so. Large-scale peer-to-peer networks offer the possibility of self-organizing communities, in which nodes recognize and create relatively stable connections to other nodes with similar interests/requirements/capabilities. A given node might participate in several such virtual communities at a given …
