A Maay Peer is a basic element of the system. A peer is the virtual counterpart of a user. It contains:

• a Maay Node: this is the coordinator of the peer. The Maay Node is responsible of the peer-to-peer communication. The user can interact with its Maay Node through interfaces. By now, only a Web interface is available. The Maay Node runs the protocol and the algorithms and uses the database
• a Maay Indexer is associated with a folder on a machine. The indexer crawls the files on this folder and updates the database of the Maay Node through an interface. By now, an interface based on XML-RPC is available. The Maay Node can accept several Maay Indexers from different computers. The Maay Indexer also considers public and private data.