Content-centric networking and microdata

PARC's content-centric networking (CCN), aka named data networking, is a "master idea" about how to re-architect the internet, given what we've learned since the WWW took off.

Like Git, CCN uses content-based addressing. A piece of content has a symbolic name (e.g. /com/nytimes/front-page/2011/02/19), which is cryptographically bound to a signature of the creator of the content (e.g. NYT Corp), and to a hash of the data.

Symbolic names have hierarchical structure, and are late-bound: a common example is /room/projector which is an interface to the projector in the current room. (Plan 9, anyone?)

There are two kinds of packets used in the CCN protocol: Interest and Data packets.

• An interest packet is analogous to an HTTP GET, and expresses the client's interest in a piece of content given its symbolic name.
• A data packet is analogous to an HTTP response, and satisfies an interest. It contains arbitrary content, cryptographically bound to its creator via a signature and to its symbolic name. The receiver can thus easily verify that the content is legit.

CCN can not only be used for classic WWW-style applications, but also for multimedia protocols like VoIP. Results show adequate performance compared to stock protocols. From CCN's content-based architecture we get a lot of benefits for free (e.g. caching is much easier).

Content-centric architectures seem ideally suited to the problems of our current, heavily fragmented social web experience. We still need to figure out the details, though.

See also: camlistore, Content-Addressable Multi-Layer Indexed Storage, a "gitified" database, by the Google frat pack.