In today's world, internet users share common interests, professional experience and knowledge over the web through a variety of media, including Usenet and internet relay chat as well as instant messaging and e-mail. Knowshare, a peer-to-peer file sharing network, brings together the best aspects of these platforms to create an environment where online communities can form, evolve, thrive and be sustained.

The Project

The Knowshare project is part of the Online Learning Communities Project (OLC) at the IT-University of Göteborg
A background and description of the project are available (in Swedish) here

What we propose

There are many tools and platforms on the net today that do one specific task very well. Web forums such as phpBB and Instant messaging systems like ICQ are good examples – but they tend to be loaded down with advanced features and extended capabilities not intrinsic to the central function of the tool, and difficult for most users to understand or exploit. We believe that the core purpose of internet tools is to enhance and encourage user communication, and have therefore developed a versatile, multi-featured platform that strips away those "extra" features to create a simplified environment that runs on a single network structure, is customizable and that has a shallow learning curve for end-uers.

Knowshare uses a topical menu structure similar to the hierarchical structure of Usenet newsgroups, which allows the system to house a vast number of communities. Users can browse the available communitiesto locate discussions of interest.

Knowshare is modular, allowing for scalable installations that can be upgraded over time. The peer-to-peer service model reduces individual server load, insuring that network traffic remains manageable even with a very large number of communities on a single server. The modular services can be optionally implemented in client software depending on the devices used to access the community. Clients using desktop computers will typically implement all of the defined services, while clients for terminals with fewer resources (such as PDAs) will only implement the basic features, -- an important feature as the availability and popularity of mobile networked terminals such as smartphones and wi-fi equipped PDA's increases. Users can stay in contact with their community at all times, not just when sitting in front of their desktop or laptop computer.

The core services provided by Knowshare include self- publishing tools, discussion forums, chat, instant messaging and user information publishing and retrieval. The self-publishing tool relies on a p2p file sharing network and allows any user to share resources with the community. Knowshare allows for the storage of content metadata -- using the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative standards -- on the central server to facilitate advanced indexing, searching and browsing of shared resources, while actual resources are transferred between users on the peer-to-peer network.

Progress to date

A proof-of-concept network and client has been developed for Knowshare that demonstrates the hierarchical structure behind community organization, making "community browsing" possible. The self-publishing tool has been implemented, as well as a simple forum. Windows version of the client is available for download here. Linux/UNIX version will be available for download on this webpage shortly.

Future plans

We hope to be able to form a project to develop a production version of the Knowshare services and clients for both PC's and handheld devices.