Service-Based Semantic Collaboration in Networked Systems: A Conceptual Perspective

Modern distributed 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, under highly dynamic conditions and in absence of a global view of the resources shared across the information systems, semantic modeling tools need to be defined. In particular, the emergence of semantic agreement for knowledge sharing through a ???maieutics??? (inductive) process based on peer interaction is a key issue for integration and sharing of distributed data and services. To this purpose, we propose the construction of a semantic overlay for service sharing and discovery in service-oriented collaborative systems in a P2P scenario. The semantic overlay is built over the P2P network. Each peer has ontology-based service descriptions, and, in addition, semantic links towards similar service descriptions belonging to different peers are established and maintained according to the network evolution. The result is a P2P-integrated knowledge space (here considered for services but extendible to data),
where the semantic overlay is a CONTINUOUSLY ??? ??? evolving conceptual map across collaborative peers that provide similar services and constitute synergic service centres in a given domain. The semantic links enable effective similarity-based service search and optimization strategies are defined for request propagation over the P2P network. Innovative aspects of our contribution are: (i) a new conceptual modeling perspective, where specific modeling requirements are due to the combined application of service-oriented and P2P technologies; (ii) the development of a comprehensive semantic framework apt to support service-based collaboration in P2P environments by implementing techniques for semantic service description and for semantic link definition among distributed services; (iii) the adoption of the framework to implement effective and efficient service discovery, according to optimization policies, in the collaborative environment.