Towards Peer-to-Peer Semantic Web: A Distributed Environment for Sharing Semantic Knowledge on the Web

The real value of Semantic Web vision can be demonstrated if people and applications can create and discover new and interesting knowledge and share this knowledge in a transparent manner similar to the way data is exchanged today. Therefore, we believe that Semantic Web will consist of a distributed environment of shared and interoperable ontologies, which have emerged as common formalisms for knowledge representation. The users will need to discover new ontologies, which are not known to them before and use them to either annotate the content or to formulate their information requests. This requires an environment that supports creating, maintaining, and controlled sharing of ontologies. We believe that a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) infrastructure can enable such capabilities. We call our approach P2P Semantic Web (PSW) with capabilities to find relevant set of ontologies, facilitating reuse of existing ontologies to create additional ontologies, and advertising the resulting ontologies. We discuss an ontology driven search of concepts and services and exploration of inter-ontological relationships over a P2P infrastructure. The prototyping of this approach in the InfoQuilt system is also discussed