A lightweight protocol is used by clients to communicate with the giFT process, allowing the protocol code to be completely abstracted from the user interface. There are already several GUI front-ends available for giFT for use under both Windows, Macintosh, and Linux.
giFT has strong ties with its sibling project OpenFT, a peer-to-peer file sharing network protocol that incorporates the concept of 'search' nodes and 'index' supernodes in addition of common nodes. Supernodes is a concept that was first conceived in the proprietory FastTrack protocol currently used by Kazaa.
giFT was written using relatively cross-platform C code. At the time of this writing giFT 0.11.2 has been released--using an up-to-date version requires pulling the source code from CVS and compiling it manually.
According to the giFT documentation:
"Search nodes handle search requests. They search the filelists their CHILD (common) nodes submitted to them. These nodes must have a capable Internet connection and at least 128M RAM. A modern processor is highly recommended as well"
and
"INDEX nodes keep lists of available search nodes, collect statistics, and try to maintain the structure of the network."
GIFT is an acronym for Gamete Intra-Fallopian Transfer, an assisted birth technique.
External Links
Gift - Content based image retrieval system
The GNU Image Finding Tool is a Content Based Image Retrieval System (CBIRS). You can do Query By Example on images, giving you the opportunity to improve query results by relevance feedback. The program relies entirely on the content of the images to process queries, so you needn't annotate images before querying the collection.
It comes with a tool which lets you index whole directory trees containing images in one go. You then can use the GIFT server and its client, SnakeCharmer (separate package), to browse your own image collections.
External Link: GIFT home page