The Planet Project: collaborative educational content repositories on structured peer-to-peer grids

In this paper we present the Planet Project. Its main goal is focused on educational content generation and wide-area distribution. For that matter, we have designed a distributed content repository (PlanetDR) which has been built on top of a structured peer-to-peer grid middleware called Dermi. The system has been made with interoperability in mind and it thus follows the IMS Digital Repositories Interoperability standard through an implementation of the eduSource Communication Language protocol. PlanetDR has been extended to support a federation mode, which to the best of our knowledge constitutes the first attempt in providing an alliance of content repositories throughout a structured peer-to-peer grid. Moreover, we have also created several collaborative tools which will he integrated in the content's life cycle in order to promote knowledge communities around educational content hierarchies. Subsequently, we have developed PlanetDR Communities which allow researchers to easily locate themselves by their own keywords of interest, which are stored and looked up in a peer-to-peer grid decentralized infrastructure.