Dynamic Knowledge Discovery in Open, Distributed and Multi-Ontology Systems: Techniques and Applications

In open distributed systems like peer-to-peer networks and Grids, many independent peers, possibly spanned across multiple organizations, need to share information resources (e.g., data, documents, services) provided by other nodes. By dynamic knowledge discovery we mean the capability of each node of finding knowledge in the system about information resources that, at a given moment, best match the requirements of a request for given target resource(s). The chapter will focus on describing models and techniques for ontology metadata management and ontology-based dynamic knowledge discovery in open distributed systems, by describing the architecture of a toolkit for information resource discovery and sharing developed in the HELIOS peer-based system.