Service-oriented Semantic Collaboration in Distributed Information Systems

Collaborative information systems in a P2P scenario are characterized by a set of independent peers that dynamically need to cooperate by sharing data and services. For effective collaboration, in absence of a global view of the resources shared across the information systems, semantic interoperability tools are required. In the paper we focus on interoperability issues for service discovery and sharing. We propose an architectural framework for the construction of a service semantic overlay in which peers storing similar services are considered semantic neighbors, that is potential collaboration partners, and are related by semantic links. In particular, semantic neighbors can be exploited to enforce a semantic service request forwarding protocol and to provide a scalable infrastructure for peer communications. The proposed semantic forwarding protocol and policies are described and preliminary experimentation results are discussed.