Two-level communication protocol for a Web operating system (WOS TM)

The World Wide Web consists not only of informational, but also computational resources. However these resources, especially computational ones are underutilized. One characteristic of the Web is its ever changing structure; for instance, nodes are dynamically added and removed. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to draw a complete and accurate picture of available resources. We consider the Web as a versioned system: resources, services and protocols are versioned. This paper presents a two-level protocol within this framework. The first protocol, the WOS Request Protocol (WOSRP), allows to select an appropriate version of a server. The second protocol, the WOS Protocol (WOSP), allows for locating and using these distributed (informational and computational) resources. We show how the latter protocol provides an efficient fault-tolerant resource search mechanism