Thursday, May 8, 2008

It sure sounds like P2P...but is it???

Is ERDAS TITAN built on a peer to peer (P2P) network technology?

Not today. Although the ERDAS TITAN user’s experience resembles a Peer to Peer (P2P) network experience (sharing, discovering, accessing data within a network of users), by definition it is not. In ERDAS TITAN, clients rely on a proxy server – an ERDAS TITAN GeoHub - as a middleman for all communication, indexing, access and data streaming. In a P2P network clients interact directly with one another in some fashion, for activities like communication, data access and download.

GeoHubs process requests, index, stream and cache data, but do not host any data. Instead, data is maintained locally and the GeoHub acts as a relay mechanism, processing requests and streaming data between users. This inherently is an added security feature, as the GeoHub is able to manage the channels between users.

Also to note, ERDAS TITAN has no true download capability (besides the sharing of KMLs) and instead advances the notion of streaming data as a service to clients through GeoHubs.

Future plans for TITAN include enabling optional download capabilities and also P2P sharing for GeoHubs.




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