LionShare P2P is an innovative technology that will facilitate legitimate file-sharing among institutions around the world through the use of authenticated Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networking. LionShare technology (which is currently under development) will provide tools for the exchange of academic, personal and work-related materials on an officially sanctioned and secure P2P network among participating groups and institutions around the world.

Additionally, an authentication/trust model between institutions is being developed that will allow an authenticated P2P network user at one institution to search and access resources at other participating institutions. This will extend LionShare's capabilities to a global scale by creating collaborative networks that will enable individuals from a diverse range of institutions to connect to the same secure P2P system.

The development team anticipates a stable, feature-rich application release by fall 2005.

LionShare technology is being designed to facilitate secure file-sharing among institutions around the world through the use of authenticated Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks. The LionShare team is currently developing organizational and collaborative tools for use in academic institutions by building on standard peer-to-peer technology. LionShare will provide many options to the academic community, including: tools to organize, manage and retrieve digital resources; tools for gathering and sharing information among peers; controlled access of shared materials such as digital images, audio, video and text; plus collaborative tools for facilitating joint efforts among peer institutions. Please click here for more details on LionShare capabilities.

LionShare is designed to share various learning resources including, but not limited to, digital images, audio, video, simulations, text, documents, research papers, Web resources, and other learning resources and activities. The LionShare network is also open to the sharing and publication of personal multimedia collections.

Registered users at participation institutions including faculty, staff and students.

LionShare will run on Windows 98/2000/XP, Mac OSX, Linux, Solaris.

Support will be up to the individual organizations implementing LionShare but informal support will exist for all users through the LionShare web site.

Penn State researchers, involved in the 30 month long Visual Image User Study (VIUS) which was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, identified key deficiencies in the ability of existing technologies to provide Higher Education users with the necessary tools for digital resource sharing and group collaboration. The LionShare project was designed to specifically fill these deficiencies.

The project, which originated at Penn State, is now closely associated with a number of formal partner organizations including Internet2; Simon Fraser University of Canada; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI). Internet2 is contributing a variant of their Shibboleth technology, which will facilitate the secure sharing of resources between institutions using the LionShare network. The OKI is designing coding standards that will allow easy integration of shared information between participating institutions while developers from Simon Fraser University are working on technology that will eventually make it possible for LionShare users to access national repositories using a single search inquiry.

An authenticated system, such as LionShare, uses a UserID and password combination to ensure that users are clearly identified in order to avoid anonymous usage of the system. LionShare's trust model takes this one step further. Any user who authenticates through one participating institution will be able to access certain resources from other institutions. In other words, one institution trusts the authentication process of another institution.

LionShare differs from these other peer-to-peer (P2P) applications in several major ways:

-LionShare will search academic databases of digital resources in addition to the shared files residing on personal hard drives that other P2P applications are limited to.
-Users must be authenticated and, hence, cannot remain anonymous.
-Network monitoring and safeguards will be in place to enforce copyright laws.
-The LionShare network allows users to share files while not connected via "always on" library repository servers.
-LionShare will include academic collaboration tools rather than just file transfers.

LionShare, unlike other P2P technologies, is an authenticated file-sharing network that tracks and identifies network users - participants will never appear as "anonymous" to fellow LionShare members. The ability to link inappropriate file-sharing to specific users is expected to deter most abuses and provide a more secure computing environment.

LionShare's authenticated network is similar in concept to faculty, students, and staff placing files on a university offered personal Web space. The specific criteria that will be used to determine inappropriate use, as well as the measures that will be taken when abuse is detected, have not been determined at this point in time.

Project developers are also looking into the creation of faculty tools that will prevent inappropriate and illegal use of the LionShare network.

Yes. They will be subject to the same copyright laws and restictions as all other users.

P2P networks possess some essential advantages. A key trait of P2P is that it optimizes network usage by distributing it throughout the community of network users and thereby avoiding bottlenecks. This will allow researchers and academics to be able to exchange extremely large files via LionShare that would not otherwise have been transferable. Additionally, while most centralized, non-P2P systems are limited by their rigidity, the user-centered approach of LionShare is one that will maximize the users ability to control the sharing, downloading, and organizing of digital media while providing direct collaborative tools for individuals, departments, and organizations.

Many instructors, scholars, researchers, and librarians across higher education institutions have "hidden" repositories of digital content (images, audio, video, research papers, learning resources, learning activities, etc.) used for teaching, research, and outreach stored on their networks or even individual hard drives. This content is "hidden" in the sense that other potential users at their own and other institutions have no way to discover these resources. In short, there is a distribution problem for the digital content. A peer-to-peer distribution network would solve this problem via a federated search and retrieve strategy that allows a single search query to reach all available repositories.

LionShare willl not have DRM technologies built in to the application. Any DRM built into the file itself will continue to function even if it is shared on the LionShare network.

Chandler is an exciting open source Personal Information Manager (PIM) being developed by the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF). LionShare is not a PIM, it is an authenticated sharing and collaboration platform.

No, ANGEL and Napster are not related to the LionShare project.

Yes. All LionShare related technologies are being developed under the GNU General Public License. The source code will be available during the fall of 2005 along with the opportunity to participate in the testing of LionShare. Please check our news page regularly for upcoming tests and other announcements.

We welcome all comments and encourage active participation through our Wiki, mailing list, and the LionShare Chat. Please visit our development and document pages for additional information.

If you need to contact the LionShare team or an individual team member directly, please visit the contact page.