OverCite : a cooperative digital research library

Abstract

CiteSeer is a well-known online resource for the computer science research community, allowing users to search and browse a large archive of research papers. Unfortunately, its current centralized incarnation is costly to run. Although members of the community would presumably be willing to donate hardware and bandwidth at their own sites to assist CiteSeer, the current architecture does not facilitate such distribution of resources. OverCite is a design for a new architecture for a distributed and cooperative research library based on a distributed hash table (DHT). The new architecture harnesses donated resources at many sites to provide document search and retrieval service to researchers worldwide. A preliminary evaluation of an initial OverCite prototype shows that it can service more queries per second than a centralized system, and that it increases total storage capacity by a factor of n/4 in a system of n nodes. OverCite can exploit these additional resources by supporting new features such as document alerts, and by scaling to larger data sets.