Combining DHTs and SONs for semantic-based service discovery

The soaring number of available online services calls for distributed architectures to promote scalability, fault-tolerance and semantics; to provide meaningful descriptions of services; and to support their efficient retrieval. Current approaches exploit either Semantic Overlay Networks (SONs) or Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) sweetened with some "semantic sugar." SONs enable semantic driven query answering but are less scalable than DHTs, which on their turn, feature efficient but semantic-free query answering based on "exact" match. This paper presents the ERGOT system combining DHTs and SONs to enable distributed and semantic-based service discovery. A preliminary evaluation of the system performance shows the suitability of the approach both in terms of recall and number of messages. © 2009 IEEE.