Semantic Web and Peertopeer

Just as the industrial society of the last century depended on natural resources, today's society depends on information. The exchange of information has become essential for more and more areas of today's society. Semantic Web technologies address the problem of information complexity by providing advanced support for representing and processing distributed information, while Peer-to-Peer technologies address issues of system complexity by allowing flexible and decentralized information storage and processing. Systems that are based on Semantic Web and Peer-to-Peer promise to combine the advantages of the two mechanisms. A Peer-to-Peer style architecture for the Semantic Web will avoid both physical and semantic bottlenecks limiting information and knowledge exchange. Staab and Stuckenschmidt structured the selected contributions into four parts: Part I on "Data Storage and Access" discusses data modelling and querying in a flexible and yet scalable manner due to the semantic heterogeneity of different peers. Part II "Querying the Network" considers continuous as well as personalized queries in structured and unstructured networks. Par III about "Semantic Integration" deals with the mapping of heterogeneous data representations. Finally Part IV on "Methodology and Systems" reports experiences from case studies and sample applications. The overall result is a state-of-the-art description of the potential of Semantic Web and Peer-to-Peer technologies for information sharing and knowledge management when applied jointly. It serves researchers in academia and industry as an excellent and lasting reference and source of inspiration.