Libreant architecture

Libreant is meant to be a distributed system. Actually, you can even think of nodes as standalone-systems. A node is not aware of other nodes. It is a single point of distribution with no knowledge of other points.

The system that binds the nodes together is the aggregator; an aggregator acts only as a client with respect to the nodes. Therefore multiple aggregators can coexist. This also implies that the node administration does not involve the management of the aggregation mechanism and of the aggregators themselves. Similarly, it is possible to run an aggregator without running a libreant node. As a consequence, a node cannot choose whether to be aggregated or not.

The aggregation mechanism is based on Opensearch, and relies on two mandatory fields:

meaning that this entries are mandatory on a node in order to be aggregated. The result component heavily relies on the relevance extension of the response spec.

We blindly trust this relevance field, so a malicious node could bias the overall result, simply increasing the relevance fields of its entries. In this way, the management of the aggregators implies also the task of checking the fairness of the aggregated nodes.

How to set up an aggregator

  1. Install Libreant. Follow the instructions on Installation.

  2. Launch Libreant setting the AGHERANT_DESCRIPTIONS configuration parameters. Its value should be a list of URLs. Each URL represents the Opensearch description. For Libreant it’s located in /description.xml, so a typical URL looks like:

    http://your.doma.in/description.xml
    

    and a typical invocation looks like:

    libreant --agherant-descriptions "http://your.doma.in/description.xml http://other.node/description.xml"
    

    If you want to aggregate the same libreant instance that you are running, there’s a shortcut: just use SELF. Here’s an example:

    libreant --agherant-descriptions "SELF http://other.node/description.xml"
    

    Note

    Through agherant command line program, it’s possible to run an aggregator without launching the whole libreant software