This is a very short introduction to the project WikiReg. The slides were used during a lunch-meeting at DANS (http://www.dans.knaw.nl/en)

1. Decentralised entity registry
“WikiReg”
Christophe Guéret
November 5, 2012
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2. Entity registry
Associates some data to a unique identifier
Example: DOI, DNS, …
Typically, a (set) of central authority maintain and
serve the data
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3. Why decentralising ?
Limit of central authorities
Costly to scale
Implies good connectivity
Read-mostly, slow/risky updates
Single points of failure
Benefits of central authorities
Easy to see where the data comes from
Easy to control unique identifiers
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4. Why decentralising ?
In some contexts, deploying a central server is
challenging (if possible at all)
Developing countries
Disaster aftermath
Increase the hardware contribution of the clients
Make the system
More robust
More dynamic
Able to function “off line”, in a mesh network
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5. Example usage context
No Internet, no central access point → Mesh
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6. Target architecture
Synchronization
+ authoritative source
Features
Fetch data associated to identifier
Associate new data to an identifier
Create/delete identifiers
Search for identifiers based on contained data
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7. (Planned) part of the solution
Use Linked Data
Provide identifiers
Allows for connections among data sources
Based on open standards
Use a NoSQL back-end to store the data
associated to the identifiers
Optimized to store large amount of flat records
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8. Linked Data
Graph/facts based knowledge representation tool
Connect resources to properties / other resources
Web-based: resources have a URI
Try http://dbpedia.org/resource/Amsterdam
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