A peer's-eye view: network term clouds in a peer-to-peer system

We investigate term clouds that represent the content available in a peer-to-peer (P2P) network. Such network term clouds are non-trivial to generate in distributed settings. Our term cloud generator was implemented and released in Tribler--a widely-used, server-free P2P system--to support users in understanding the sorts of content available. Our evaluation and analysis focuses on three aspects of the clouds: coverage, usefulness and accumulation speed. A live experiment demonstrates that individual peers accumulate substantial network-level information, indicating good coverage of the overall content of the system. The results of a user study carried out on a crowdsourcing platform confirm the usefulness of clouds, showing that they succeed in conveying to users information on the type of content available in the network. An analysis of five example peers reveals that accumulation speeds of terms at new peers can support the development of a semantically diverse term set quickly after a cold start. This work represents the first investigation of term clouds in a live, 100% server-free P2P setting.