Smart Mirrors: peer-to-peer Web services for publishing electronic documents

Web services represent an attractive technology for e-government applications, since they can be used to disseminate documents such as tax return forms, budget reports, regulatory laws, etc. In this paper, we consider the problem of serving such documents through Web services, with the goal of completing the user's request in minimum time (turnaround time). We propose a distributed peer-to-peer mirror system, the Smart Mirrors System, which continuously collects information from peers, in order to decide the best approach to follow in serving each request. The different research issues being considered are: architecture of the system, cost model to estimate service time by each particular server, interchange of metadata and service requests among peers.