Information Retrieval in Peer to Peer Systems

The exponential increase in available data has led to an ever growing interest in information retrieval techniques. Lexical matching often fails due to synonymy and polysemy. Hence, semantic approaches have been searched for and one of these approaches is Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). The inconvenient with LSI is its heavy computational needs. Leaving all this demand on one system is impractical. The recent development in peer-to-peer networking offers a good opportunity for the development of a computationally and functionally reasonable system for information retrieval. The present paper first makes an introduction into LSI and presents peer-to-peer technology, and then suggests an infrastructure for a future IR application that will take advantage of both areas of study