Data-Sharing P2P Networks with Semantic Approximation Capabilities

The synergy between peer-to-peer systems and semantic Web technologies supports large-scale sharing of semantically rich data, usually represented through schemas such as RDF. Peers rarely share the same vocabulary, so the resulting heterogeneity of data representations introduces new challenges for the efficient and effective retrieval of relevant information. The authors leverage the presence of semantic approximations between peers' schemas to improve query routing by identifying the peers that best satisfy the user's requests, and to inform users of the relevance of the returned answers through a ranking mechanism that promotes the most semantically related results.