SoJa: Collaborative reference management using a decentralized social information system

In this (invited) paper, we present a work in progress social library and reference management system called SoJa (Social Jabref), which is realized on top of a decentralized (peer-to-peer) social information system. The contribution of the work is multi-fold. It provides a platform to collaborate and socialize to carry out a specific task (managing and sharing bibliographic meta-information). From systems design perspective, it is an effort to realize social software on a peer-to-peer infrastructure, as well as make such a peer-to-peer system robust and reliable by leveraging on the social network. Particularly, we discuss how (we think) social networks can be leveraged to build reliable indexing, routing and storage services. We elaborate on the SocialCircle DHT which exclusively uses social links, and hence is expected to be naturally robust against various kinds of attacks. We also discuss several open challenges currently under investigation, which need to be addressed to build mature systems that can be deployed at large-scale. Furthermore, while not the principal focus of this specific work, the experiences in realizing SoJa are also directly relevant to the recent spate of work on realizing decentralized online social networks (DOSNs).