A unified multimedia and semantic perspective for data retrieval in the semantic web

In recent years, the emerging diffusion of peer-to-peer networks is going beyond the single-domain paradigm like, for instance, the mono-thematic file sharing one (e.g. Napster for music). Peers are more and more heterogeneous data sources which need to share data with commercial, educational, and/or collaboration purposes, just to mention a few. Moreover, in current information processing applications data cannot be meaningfully searched by precise database queries that would return exact matches (e.g. when dealing with multimedia, proteomic, statistical data).