Emergent Semantics and Cooperation in Multi-knowledge Communities: the ESTEEM Approach

Abstract

In the present global society, information has to be exchangeable in open and dynamic environments, where interacting users do not necessarily share a common understanding of the world at hand. This is particularly true in P2P scenarios, where millions of autonomous users (peers) need to cooperate by sharing their resources (such as data and services). We propose the Esteem approach (Emergent Semantics and cooperaTion in multi-knowledgE EnvironMents), where a comprehensive framework and a platform for data and service discovery in P2P systems are proposed, with advanced solutions for trust and quality-based data management, P2P infrastructure definition, query processing and dynamic service discovery in a context-aware scenario. In Esteem, semantic communities are built around declared interests in the form of manifesto ontologies and their autonomous nature is preserved by allowing a shared semantics to naturally emerge from the peer interactions. Inside the borders of semantic communities data and services are discovered, queried and invoked in a resource sharing scenario, where the context in which users interoperate and the trust of exchanged information are also relevant aspects to take into account

A principled approach to context schema evolution in a data management perspective

“…the previously envisaged contexts, known by the user (and by the context-aware application) at a given moment; thus the system must be able to respond to queries and applications in a seamless way, that is, a way as similar as possible to the context-aware behavior the users and applications expect. Note that studying context schema evolution is also preliminary to understanding context sharing among different users, a need that may arise in P2P scenarios [15].…”