The Fusion of XML and Peer-to-Peer for e-Business

1. Challenge of content distribution

Today, eBusiness is predominantly done via the corporate intranet, and between partners over the extranet and Internet. Companies are using intranet portals as a primary point of access to business-critical content. At the same time, they are striving for tighter integration with their suppliers, partners and customers via the Internet and extranet. Naturally, corporate users demand to access business critical information, via a single point of access, whether its source is internal or external to the company. Companies are looking for ways to integrate information from internal sources with information from commercial publishers on their intranets and portals.

2. Virtual libraries and valuable content

Comprehensive content networks require virtual libraries with customized, real-time information, rather than inflexible data collections. Corporate users and user-groups will access content, dynamically created from various sources and formats, based on their business needs. Virtual libraries will provide content as needed by individual knowledge workers. Last but not least, these flexible models allow to perfectly support specific standards of technology used to access data, which varies if the user works with mobile systems or in the normal corporate environment.

In any organization, it is extremely challenging to leverage company knowledge and get information to flow effectively. To maximize effectiveness of knowledge mining, live access to any, even informal data is important.

3. Weakness of centralized and replicated content management

Intranets are limited in scope, external standard, customer-facing web sites are not meeting transactional needs in established B2B relationships, finally Extranets are often perceived as complicated and too focused on a particular data source or application. As companies have to exchange massive amounts of content with their business partners, suppliers, and customers a more robust and seamless content infrastructure is demanded. Especially if it is considered that critical business information is usually stored in various formats on disparate servers.

Centralized data sources require replication of documents and force to manage content created by others. This is relatively costly and inefficient. Creating a centralized index reduces the richness of the data and still needs continuous access to various sources if expected to be up-to-date. Both alternatives yet dominate the current eBusiness infrastructure. But even in theory, neither of these concepts allows to fully support unlimited access and sharing of content in real-time.

Today, information in general and company knowledge are undisputedly recognized as the most valuable and important goods for any business. Not storing and archiving of mass data is important, in fact availability and access is relevant. The aim must be to maximize the efficiency while reducing the cost of maintaining and distributing content.

4. How Peer-To-Peer Content Networks meet these needs

Peer-To-Peer Content Networks allow access to decentralized content in its native format. Participants in content networks access and provide information in real-time. By that, P2P or server-to-server technology can break down the political and technological barriers that impede the ability to provide seamless access to disparate sources of information.

In professional environments, the access can be strictly controlled and managed. This is decisive, as legal protection and maximum security are absolutely required in B2B business. In fact, content providers can predict and control the use of their intellectual property more effectively than in situations, were complete document collections are physically provided to external users.

Corporate users search and navigate sources as if they exist on one server. Virtual libraries can still be personalized according the user profiles. Thus, even shared content can be branded and meets the needs of each independent user.

To allow real-time and efficient information sharing, P2P networks require robust and scalable technology. Furthermore, access to decentralized servers implies secure solutions. Companies like NextPage have addressed the needs of future information marketplaces by providing a platform for enterprise solutions. Last but not least, effective search technology and "intelligent" handling of search results is needed to avoid information overload.

5. The P2P market expectations

Peer-To-Peer technology for the B2B is rapidly gaining consideration. Today, P2P is often described as the next "killer application" for the Internet. An increasing number of articles and specific events emphasize the trend.

The Gartner Group has recently published a White Paper on "The Emerge of Distributed Content Management and Peer-to-Peer Content Networks". According to this "enterprises will be able to create significant new dimensions of competitive advantage by leveraging real time and otherwise unavailable content and content stakeholders.". "Gartner believes that by the year 2003, 30 percent of corporations will have experimented with Data Centered P2P applications for content distribution..."

6. XML secures and manages communication and decentralized access

Again, security is one of the key challenges for distributed content management and content networks. The B2B business requires great flexibility and security for provider and consumer of content. eContent networks consist of commercial publishers, corporate users, governmental institutions, organizations and finally the large group of individual users, which drive the network by their demand for information.

Solutions s.a. NextPage NXT3 e-Content Platform allows secure communication between servers by providing a Content Network Protocol - for which again, XML is chosen as the standard. The NXT3 Content Network Protocol is an open XML schema that wraps communication payload between two or more peer servers, allowing them to be queried simultaneously and navigated seamlessly. This is all done in real time in a peer-to-peer fashion, rather than the traditional approaches of copying information via aggregation (pull) or syndication (push) schemes, or providing a centralized index. The Content Network Protocol allows the results of two or more peer servers equipped with indexing and retrieval engines to communicate their matches, presenting the user with a fully integrated hit list filled with hits from the participating servers.

7. XML empowers the use of eContent networks

The strength of the P2P concept is the ability to search content in its native format. Access to structured and unstructured documents is supported and needed. The current and future variety of archived and newly created sources must be well considered. On the other hand XML will become more and more important as a standard for digital content.

Key advantages of XML, compared to other sources, become even more important for distributed content management and content networks. XML is the only Internet based standard, which combines and satisfies the needs of professional publishers and enterprises for structured documents. Using XML, distributed sources, developed and maintained by independent companies, can be simultaneously searched on a field or sub-document level.

At the beginning, most eContent networks will allow access to virtual content, compiled for specific users or based on the specific request. XML/XSL provides customized layouts and structures.

Commercial publishers are important components of the information networks. They do provide a large amount of the business-critical content. This group pushes forward to implement XML at least for Internet publishing.

Finally, the eContent platform must also provide access to information stored in relational databases or partially even to proprietary data types. Technologies like the NextPage NXT3 platform allow users to search these sources and transform the results to XML on the fly. Using XML/XSL display filter enable the P2P system to integrate such content to the virtual libraries.

8. Summary

Enterprises, government entities and organizations find out that they need access to massive amounts of mission critical information across servers as well as political and geographic boundaries. Commercial publishers and other professional provider of information recognize the demand for customized virtual content, aggregated from flexible data pools. P2P Content Networks provide the platform for this exiting new information technology. XML provides the standards to secure the networks and to optimize syndicated access to structured documents.

Design and Development by deepX Ltd.