Interacting the Edutella/JXTA peer-to-peer network with Web services

Edutella/JXTA is a P2P (peer-to-peer) semantic Web application, which is aimed to accommodate heterogeneous resource metadata repositories in a P2P manner and further facilitate the exchange of the resource metadata based on RDF. Whereas the initial use cases of Edutella/JXTA are defined and implemented in the context of a pure P2P setting, where all Edutella participants are JXTA peers interacting with each other via various P2P services, in this paper we investigate the interaction between Edutella/JXTA and Web services with the purpose of exchanging distributed functionalities between the two platforms. In terms of two typical interaction scenarios: (1) exposing existing Edutella/JXTA P2P services as Web services; and (2) integrating Web services enabled content providers into Edutella/JXTA, we propose an approach for achieving the service layer interaction between Edutella/JXTA and Web services through so-called Web services/Edutella proxies.