Volume 11, Number 21, December 2021

Search in a Redecentralised Web

  Authors

Thanassis Tiropanis¹, Alexandra Poulovassilis², Adriane Chapman¹ and George Roussos², ¹University of Southampton, UK, ²University of London, UK

  Abstract

Search has been central to the development of the Web, enabling increasing engagement by a growing number of users. Proposals for the redecentalisation of the Web such as SOLID aim to give individuals sovereignty over their data by means of personal online datastores (pods). However, it is not clear whether search utilities that we currently take for granted would work efficiently in a redecentralised Web. In this paper we discuss the challenges of supporting distributed search on a large scale of pods. We present a system architecture which can allow research, development and testing of new algorithms for decentralised search across pods. We undertake an initial validation of this architecture by usage scenarios for decentralised search under user-defined access control and data governance constraints. We conclude with research directions for decentralised search algorithms and deployment.

  Keywords

Redecentralisation, search, decentralised systems.