OntoVote: a scalable distributed vote-collecting mechanism for ontology drift on a P2P platform

Ontologies provide potential support for knowledge and content management on a P2P platform. Although we can design ontologies beforehand for an application, it is argued that in P2P environments static or predefined ontologies cannot satisfy the ever-changing requirements of all users. So we propose every user should make proposals for what kind of ontology is the most apt to his need. Collecting all these proposals (or votes) helps the drift of ontologies. This paper introduces OntoVote, a scalable distributed vote-collecting mechanism based on application-level broadcast trees, and describes how OntoVote can be applied to ontology drift on a P2P platform by discussing several problems involved in the voting process.