The ESTEEM platform: Enabling P2P semantic collaboration through emerging collective knowledge

In this paper, we present Esteem (Emergent Semantics and cooperaTion in multi-knowledgE EnvironMents), a community-based P2P platform for supporting semantic collaboration among a set of independent peers, without prior reciprocal knowledge and no predefined relationships. Goal of Esteem is to go beyond the existing state-of-the-art solutions for P2P knowledge sharing and to provide an integrated platform for both data and service discovery. A distinguishing feature of Esteem is the use of semantic communities to explicitly give shape to the collective knowledge and expertise of peer groups with similar interests. Key techniques of Esteem will be presented in the paper and concern: shuffling-based communication, ontology and service matchmaking, context management, and quality-aware data integration. An application example of data and service discovery in the health-care domain will be presented, by also discussing results of system and user evaluation. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.