2.3.17 LionShare

Lead 

Penn State University 

Origin 

U.S.A 

Background 

The LionShare project began late 2003 as an experimental software development project at Penn State 

University to assist faculty with digital file management. The project came about after a study made by Visual 

Image User Study was tasked with assessing how academic communities use digital images for teaching 

research and service. The study also identified the types of tools and services most desired in a digital image 

system. A new application was needed that provided more flexible user controlled tools for expanded 

capabilities for the discovery, management and sharing of multimedia files.  

The project has now grown to be collaborative effort between Penn State University, Massachusetts Institute 

of Technology Open Knowledge Initiative, researchers at Simon Fraser University and the Internet 2 P2P 

Working Group. A $1.1 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will be used to fund the first two years of 

the project.  

URL 

http://lionshare.its.psu.edu/main/ 

Aims and 

Lionshare is an academic orientated, peer to peer (P2P) networking technology that merges secure and 

Objectives 

expanded electronic file exchange capabilities with information gathering tools into a single, open source 

application. Thus, the LionShare project team foresees this project having four major components:  

1. 

It offers a secure, authenticated environment in which users are known to their institution and to 

each other. Personal collections and community collections can be shared with the efficiency of a 

P2P network without the threat of unauthorised access or undesired content 

2. 

Lionshare peer servers provide a persistent mirror for content to ensure that designated files can be 

available for sharing when a personal peer, such as an instructor's laptop, is disconnected  

3. 

Lionshare incorporates international interoperability protocols that provide access to a growing 

mass of content stored in networks of learning object repositories around the world 

4. 

Lionshare allows publishers to describe their resources using a relevant metadata schema (e.g. 

IEEE LOM etc) and allows searchers to query against metadata. 

Metadata 

IEEE LOM 

Standards 

Content 

unable to find information at time of writing 

Packaging 

Page 51 of 84