Automatic Hyperlink Creation Using P2P and Publish/Subscribe

Abstract

The World-Wide Web allows users to quickly and easily publish information in the form of web pages. Pages are linked to other pages already on the web using a hyperlink inserted into a web page by the page’s author that contains the URL address of another existing web page. This model of web publishing, although simple and efficient, also has the effect that links between pages must be created manually and only to pages that are known to the author of the links. This can be a disadvantage if, for example, information in a particular field is incomplete and expanding rapidly over time, and where a page author cannot be expected to know which pages are the most appropriate to link to and when they become available.

In this paper, we look at a radically different model of web publishing in which the author of a web page does not specify links using URLs. Instead, the page author expresses an interest about the kind of content the page should link to and as new content comes online that matches that interest, links are inserted automatically into the original page to point to the new content. This leads to the possibility that a hyperlink from a particular location in a web page can lead to multiple destinations, something we call a multi-valued hyperlink.

We also describe a prototype implementation of our web architecture, based on the CHORD-based peer-to-peer overlay network, which uses publish/subscribe to communicate page author interests to other peers in order to create links between pages.