Taxonomy-based Conceptual Modeling for Peer-to-Peer Networks

We present a taxonomy-based conceptual modeling approach for building P2P systems that support semantic-based retrieval services. We adopt this simple conceptual modeling approach due to its advantages in terms of ease of use, uniformity, scalability and efficiency. As each peer uses its own taxonomy for describing the contents of its objects and for formulating queries to the other peers, peers are equipped with articulations, i.e. inter-taxonomy mappings, in order to carry out the required translation tasks. We describe various kinds of articulations and we give the semantics for each case. Then we discuss the differences between query evaluation in mediators and query evaluation in P2P systems, and finally we identify issues for further research.