On Ranking Peers in Semantic Overlay Networks

Knowledge management solutions relying on central repositories sometimes have not met expectations, since users often create knowledge ad-hoc using their individual vocabulary and using their own individual IT infrastructure (e.g., their laptop). The introduction of the peer-to-peer paradigm to knowledge management is currently seen as a promising technology to overcome this challenge. A major problem within peer-to-peer systems is to find the best peer given a certain query. In this paper we introduce three semantic overlay layers which can be used to score the known peers according to their probability to answer a query. We here consider queries for documents organized in a topic hierarchy. Since, the peer selection problem is very similar to the task of finding an expert within an organization, the algorithms can also be used in such a scenario.