Node
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The main tangible result of the project is the Platform network which is a network of independent organisations all sharing their knowledge. This sharing of knowledge is achieved by adopting a common informational infrastructure, and the foundation of this structure is the concept of the "Node". A node may be a simple as a blog post or may represent a large organisation containing departments, projects, procedures and resources.
The most fundamental properties common to all nodes is that they can also be seen as a group having one or more members (a member is also a node). The concept of groups and membership is addressed at a fundamental level so that privacy and collaboration are introduced prior to all other concepts. The trust group is one of the most fundamental instances of this concept and allows the members to decide amongst themselves in private what other kinds of nodes will comprise their group such as contracts, relationships, resources and procedures etc.
Technically a node is an informational "container" of content and relationships to other nodes, and has a globally unique identification number. Some basic properties that a node may contain are names (used to refer to or give meaning to the node in various written languages), type (to denote the node as representing for example a contact, group, project or document), and other properties depending on its use and context.
The nodes are part of a peer-to-peer network that allows them to remain in a persistent state and to have active schedules of work and notification continue on regardless of whether or not any of its members are connected to it.
The method of user interaction with the network is via a viewer application (in the MVC sense) which initially will be a standard web-browser based Single Page Application using the Livelets SWF method, events can be propagated asynchronously from the local peer up to the browser instances, and interface events can be routed the other way down into the peer of necessary.
