| The Semantic Web and Peer-to-Peer are two technologies that address a common
need at different levels:
• The Semantic Web addresses the requirement that one may model, manipulate
and query knowledge and information at the conceptual level rather than at the
level of some technical implementation. Moreover, it pursues this objective in a
way that allows people from all over the world to relate their own view to this
conceptual layer. Thus, the Semantic Web brings new degrees of freedom for
changing and exchanging the conceptual layer of applications.
• Peer-to-Peer technologies aim at abandoning centralized control in favor of decentralized
organization principles. In this objective they bring new degrees of
freedom for changing information architectures and exchanging information between
different nodes in a network.
• Together, Semantic Web and Peer-to-Peer allow for combined flexibility at the
level of information structuring and distribution.
Historical Remarks and Acknowledgements
How to benefit from this combined flexibility has been investigated in a number of
research efforts. In particular, we coordinated the EU IST research project “SWAP
— Semantic Web and Peer-to-peer” (http://swap.semanticweb.org) that
led to many chapters of this book1 and, also, to a 15,000 Euro doIT software innovation
award for the work on Bibster (see Chap. 18) from the local government of the
German state of Baden-Württemberg. Thus, we are very much indebted to the EU
for generously funding this project. |
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