View article

The Internet has become the common medium for content distribution. Searching content using keywords is well-known. But there are many shortcomings to it. Users cannot search within the content and on many of the attributes of the content, ie, other than its name. Content is also becoming increasingly decentralized. New mechanisms allowing access to complex distributed content is needed. We introduce a hashing-based method for accessing complex content over large dynamic networks such as peer-to-peer networks, which uses distributed hash tables in a novel way. In particular, we are interested in spatial content that is becoming popular in databases. Our method is scalable, addressing the needs of todays networks.