Emergent communities for semantic collaboration in multi-knowledge environments : methods and techniques

The need of sharing data and resources to foster semantic collaboration is a key problem at the current stage of development of open distributed systems. In this context, autonomous and self-organizing communities of peers emerge by bringing together those peers that are interested in similar topics and plan to strengthen their cooperations. The Ph.D. thesis abstract illustrates a semantic handshake process based on ontologies and ontology matching techniques to handle consensus negotiation and peer community formation. Furthermore, we discuss the possible benefits deriving from semantic community adoption by describing the community-aware query propagation strategy for effective distribution of resource requests on a semantic basis within a committed community.