Exploring JXTASearch for P2P educational media discovery

In this paper we present a peer-to-peer (P2P) application that aims at improving the discoverability of educational media typically distributed over different universities and institutions. We investigate JXTASearch, a distributed search engine constructed on Sun's open source P2P platform JXTA, and further extend it to support Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) based P2P searches. While the JXTA platform provides essential interoperability among various peers at the "network" level, DCMES constitutes the minimal interoperable basis for educational media discovery at the "metadata" level. We then discuss the advantages and shortcomings of our prototype implementation, as well as future work building upon our experience with the prototype.