Hi there, I am keen to find out about one particular aspect of search implementation in GnuNet. I belong to a small community of like minds who would like to exchange in a safer possible way some parts of our collections. Within our community we don't know each other personally and often reside in different countries. While the nature of our collections is somewhat peculiar because we collect meta-tagged images (primarily multiple *.JPG and *.PNG files tagged by IPTC/MWG with the use of ExifTool), and the content of images could be anything like pages from a new book that's just come out, a figure from an electronic publication that can be only purchased, or just photos from posh magazines. This means that the content can be potentially subject to copyright claims, so trust and privacy (anonymity) in the process of exchange is crucial. The thing about ExifTool is that there are multiple tools which allow one to run search queries by metadata, but all of them do it only locally. While the nature of metadata is somewhat shaky because there is currently no way to ensure the validity of the tags and their claimed match with the content. To put it simply, an image may be picturing a pet, but the tags are saying that this is a lion or planet Jupiter. That's why we rely so much on trust and welcome only sensible people to avoid fakes. The reason we've paid some attention to existing P2P solutions is because our collections are vast and we would love to search in each other's collections and so to exchange. Not many P2P actually have in-built search engines (eg. eDonkey has, BitTorrent doesn't), while search by metadata is desirable but even a more distant perspective. GnuNet seems to have the F2F topology which separates it from many other existing solutions. In order for it to fit in with our requirements, I suppose, some additional development may be required. So I wonder how flexible you are with regards to the implementation of the search by metadata in GnuNet?
I would appreciate any comments from your side. With best regards.
