Semantic Interoperability and Dynamic Resource Discovery in P2P Systems

Service-oriented architectures and Semantic Web technologies are widely recognized as strategic means to enable effective search and access to data and services in P2P systems. In this paper we present SERVANT, a reference architecture to support SERVice-based semANTic search, by means of a semantic distributed service registry. Specifically, SERVANT supports the automatic discovery of services, available in the P2P network, apt to satisfy users requests for information searches. The SERVANT architecture is based on: a distributed service registry, DSR, composed of semantic-enriched peer registries and semantic links between peer registries holding similar services; a Service Knowledge Evolution Manager, to update peer knowledge; a Semantic Search Assistant, to find services satisfying a users request, to suggest possible alternative services and to propose possible related services for composition. The proposed architecture allows for efficient semantic search based on service discovery throughout the network and is able to manage P2P network evolution.