GeoTorrent

Objective: Develop an extension to the BitTorrent Protocol [1] which takes the spatio-temporal aspects of geospatial data into account.

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer protocol which, according to Wikipedia, provides “significant reduction in the original distributor's hardware and bandwidth resource costs. It also provides redundancy against system problems and reduces dependence on the original distributor.” Only small chunks of data are requested each time, and is downloaded randomly or following a certain algorithm e.g. rarest first. Sharing Models in the Digital Earth usually also requires to share whole (potentially very large) datasets. Domain experts coming from the modeling community might be reluctant to host OGC Web Services, but still want to publish the data more efficiently (and persistently). Seeding the data into the GeoTorrent network might offer a solution here.

Geo-Torrent should build on top of existing BitTorrent Networks, but will also offer the possibility to query subsets of the data (regarding its spatial and temporal dimension). The BitTorrent protocol might then need to be extended to incorporate these extended query capabilities. Another potential (subsequent) Bachelor thesis would be a portal to find datasets published in the geo-torrent network.