An Investigation of the Use of Overlay Networks in Developing Scalable and Reliable Information Sharing Web/Services

Previous work on addressing the problems of scalability and limited autonomy of data sources arising from the semantic heterogeneity of peer schema has proposed a layered model/approach of ontology integration consisting of peer and coalition ontology and the mapping between them. In particular, the integration model for achieving semantic interoperability in Data and Knowledge Systems (DAKS) is accompanied by an agent-based operational model devised to support reliable and scalable operations for information sharing in the highly distributed and decentralised environment of P2P networks. Our current work augments the multi-agent system (MAS) design with Web Services technology and a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that provides loosely coupled and reusable components to encapsulate the semantically discrete functionality of the multilayer ontology integration model. A simple exemplar permitting P2P validation checks to be performed on JPEG-2000 image metadata is described.