ORION - Ontology-based queRy routIng in Overlay Networks

Current search engines are rapidly changing to embrace more powerful mechanisms that are capable of reasoning on semantic attributes of contents in a distributed repository. Formalisms have been proposed to represent the semantic attributes. Yet, traditional approaches for content sharing in peer-to-peer systems cannot be adapted to use semantic information. Some novel proposals in the literature consider semantic aspects in P2P systems. However, they either make strong assumptions on the semantic model, or have high communication and computation overhead. In this work, we propose a completely distributed infrastructure, where peers self-organize in an overlay network that mirrors the semantic relations among contents held by peers, in order to support semantic routing of queries. No assumption is needed about peers’ knowledge. Simulations show that the rate of successful content retrieval is higher than for other solutions with equally null assumptions on the system, with lower costs.