Hello Jer -<br><br>Nice to hear some more detatils about the Atlas protocol.<br><br>Splitting up responsibilities into a Factory, Collector and a Broker seems <br>reasonable to me. This will make it easier to collaborate between systems.
<br><br>However - looking at the end result (I know this could take a couple of years). how <br>can the end user expect to trust what the various entities have delivered?<br><br>As an end user I would expect finegrained control over all the parts of the system -
<br>in such a way that I can exclude results coming from a Factory that I do not trust and<br>keep results coming from factories that I do trust. This imposes som constraints on <br>the collector.<br><br>How is this trust-relationship to be determined? My guess would be to introduce som sort
<br>of trust-token the users could pass to the Brokers and the Collectors.<br><br>I look forward to hearing more details about Atlas.<br><br>greets,<br>Jacob Andresen<br><br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 05/07/07,
<b class="gmail_sendername">jer</b> <<a href="mailto:jeremie@jabber.org">jeremie@jabber.org</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
This is a brief overview of a large vision: enabling search to become<br>a part of the Internet's infrastructure. Building on Atlas as an<br>open protocol, search can become a fully distributed and<br>interoperable world-wide community. All of the participants can
<br>interact openly and in any role where they believe they can add value<br>to the network.<br><br>A search engine can be constructed from many independent entities<br>serving different roles instead of one monolithic system. These
<br>entities are exchanging aggregate information, or knowledge, and can<br>decide with whom they want to work with. To design this working<br>economy based on knowledge, there must be balance between these<br>various entities. Each actor must have incentive to act both for
<br>their own benefit and for the benefit of the whole, and enough<br>information to make and validate those decisions. Reputations and<br>relationships are the essential fabric of Atlas, just as they are in<br>a real-world free market.
<br><br>There are three primary roles within Atlas:<br><br> Factory - Responsible to the content.<br> Collector - Responsible to the keyword.<br> Broker - Responsible to the searcher.<br><br>Each of these actors must interact with the others to complete any
<br>search request. Any two roles could be performed by a single entity<br>(whereas if all three are performed by one entity, the result would<br>be a traditional, monolithic search engine).<br><br>A Factory is akin to a crawler in today's search engines. An Atlas
<br>Factory must fetch and process the content as intelligently as<br>possible, performing analysis (such as Natural Language Processing)<br>and normalizing it into distinct units. A Factory shares its highly<br>refined and processed output with one or more Collectors based on who
<br>they believe is best utilizing it.<br><br>A Collector absorbs and indexes output from one or more Factories,<br>with one primary goal: ranking. An Atlas Collector must provide the<br>most intelligent ranking and relationship analysis possible. A
<br>Collector has to compete for the output of a Factory, as well as<br>compete to provide the best ranking quality for Brokers.<br><br>A Broker must provide a searcher with the best possible results. It<br>does so by combining diverse ranking results from Collectors and also
<br>by retrieving content from the original Factories. This last step, a<br>Broker interacting with a Factory, is critical to maintaining a<br>balanced ecosystem. All Factories must be aware of and approve how<br>their results are being used and by whom.
<br><br>Reputation and reward is bi-directional between all parties (Factory-<br>Collector, Collector-Broker, and Broker-Factory). Each entity may<br>choose to interact on principle (free, Commons), attribution (results<br>
provided by), or commercially (as a paid service), the Atlas protocol<br>is purely a facilitator and does not restrict how the relationships<br>between any entities are formed. In considering these motives for<br>the various entities, it's likely that the free-based networks will
<br>tend to become more specialized, commercial ones will compete on<br>quality, and attribution based networks will mature in both directions.<br><br>This simple yet powerful division of roles, responsibilities, and<br>relationships will result in a distributed economic foundation for an
<br>Internet Search Infrastructure. The wire protocol and further<br>definition of the interactions between these entities is openly<br>evolving, anyone interested is welcomed to join the discussions and<br>see the initial proposals at
<a href="http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/">http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/</a><br>atlas-l over the coming weeks.<br><br>Thanks, looking forward to a radically different search ecosystem in<br>the coming years :)
<br><br>Jer<br><br>_______________________________________________<br>Search-l mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Search-l@wikia.com">Search-l@wikia.com</a><br><a href="http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/search-l">http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/search-l
</a><br>Change options or unsubscribe: <a href="http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/options/search-l">http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/options/search-l</a><br></blockquote></div><br>