INFORMATION MANAGEMENT IN THE DISTRIBUTED WEB

Abstract

The World Wide Web, or simply the Web, is very extensive, in continuous expansion, but also very fragile, in continuous decay. The Web has unified the entire world into a single global information space, but the way information is preserved and distributed is fundamentally faulty. The fundamental problem rely on the way content is identified: by means location. A location-addressed Web means a Web where content can be lost, overwritten, censured, inefficiently distributed, and so centralized. The thesis claims that to resolve the problems of the Web, the Web should be built over a content-addressed peer-to-peer network. In particular, the thesis introduces Desidera, a novel approach to design and deploy websites, over a global content-addressed peer-to-peer network, and two systems: the InterPlanetary Web Space (IPWS), a versioned, data-driven content-management system, to manage and deploy content onto a content-addressed distributed file system (i.e. the InterPlanetary File System, IPFS); and Pantarei, a front-end Web framework based on HTML5 Web Components standards, to design resilient user-interfaces for websites that are delivered and distributed over a peer-to-peer network. The proposal enables a user-centric, resilient, permanent, versioned, decentralized Web.