An agent-driven, P2P architecture to enable communities of interests, resource discovery, access, and sharing

Ontologies are enabling the development of new object discovery and information retrieval on the Internet. We propose a user driven, ontology-based overlay architecture to enable Communities of Interest (CoI) for structured resource access and knowledge sharing between users of similar interests. In this paper, we describe the overlay network architecture to support the basic functionalities of a CoI. The basic tenet of this architecture is the use of ontologies to represent objects in order to enable semantic resource discovery and retrieval which reflect the interest of the user within a specific community. Three advertising and retrieval schemes, namely aggressive, crawler-based and minimum-cover-rule, are discussed and investigated using an emulation-based experimental framework. The results show that the minimum-cover-rule scheme exhibits higher performance than the other two schemes.