Semantically routing queries in peer-based systems: the H-Link approach

A challenging issue to advance the existing P2P semantic routing protocols is related to the capability of developing mechanisms for focused selection of the query recipients by taking into account a semantically rich description of the context of each peer. In this article, we present the H-Link semantic routing approach designed to exploit the results of an ontology matchmaking process for providing a semantic overlay network where peers having similar contexts are recognized and interlinked as semantic neighbors. In particular, H-Linkaims at advancing the existing semantic routing protocols by combining ontology-based peer context descriptions and ontology matching techniques for providing query forwarding on a real semantic basis, in a completely decentralized way.