Collaborative Annotation that Lasts Forever: Using Peer-to-Peer Technology for Disseminating Corpora and Language Resources

This paper describes a peer-to-peer architecture for representing and disseminating linguistic corpora, linguistic annotation, and resources such as lexical databases and gazetteers. The architecture is based upon a ‘Universal Database’ technology in which all information is represented in globally identified, extensible bundles of attribute-value pairs. These objects are replicated at will between peers in the network, and the business rules that implement replication involve checking digital signatures and proper attribution of data, to avoid information being tampered with or abuse of copyright. Universal identifiers enable comprehensive standoff annotation and commentary. A carefully constructed publication mechanism is described that enables different users to subscribe to material provided by trusted publishers on recognized topics or themes. Access to content and related annotation is provided by distributed indexes, represented using the same underlying data objects as the rest of the database.