On combining a semantic engine and flexible network policies for P2P knowledge sharing networks

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems have recently become popular for content sharing, and a number of different approaches have been studied to perform effective content retrieval in such networks. We discuss how conventional P2P network policies for content retrieval could be combined with a semantic engine component to enforce peer-based knowledge sharing. The semantic engine exploits peer ontologies for providing a semantically rich representation of peer knowledge, and matching techniques for comparing ontologies of different peers for knowledge sharing and discovery purposes.