I usually don't dive into academic papers, but this looked interesting. Haven't read it fully...

In this paper we present Captain Cook, a service that
continuously monitors resources in the Internet, and allows
clients to locate resources using this information. Captain
Cook maintains a tree-based representation of all the collected
resource information. The leaves in the tree contain
directly measured resource information, while internal
nodes are generated using condensation functions that aggregate
information in child nodes. We present examples of
how such information may be used for cluster management,
application-level routing and placement of servers, and pervasive
computing. The nodes are automatically replicated,
updates being propagated using a novel hierarchical gossip
protocol. We analyze how well this protocol behaves, and
conclude that updates propagate quickly in spite of scale,
failed nodes, and message loss