Service-oriented semantic Peer-to-Peer systems

In Peer-to-Peer data sharing systems, peers typically play equal roles and have equal capabilities. From the service perspective, peers provide a single service. For this reason, there is no need to explicitly model services. We argue, that for knowledge sharing systems, we need an effective combination of the capabilities of the peers both in terms of the services as well as the content they provide. In this paper we present an approach for modeling peers with content and service capability descriptions that allows a decentralized discovery and selection of peers. We show instantiations for various kinds of bibliographic services that are realized in the Bibster system, a semantics-based Peer-to-Peer system for sharing bibliographic metadata.