Enhancing the Peer-To-Peer Architecture with a Roaming Service and OWL

This paper addresses the problem of building a unified structure to describe a peer-to-peer system. Our approach uses the well-known notations in the P2P area, and provides a global architecture that puts a separation between the platform specific characteristics and the logical ones. In order to enable the navigation of the peer across platforms, a roaming layer is added. The latter provides a capability to define a unique identification of peer and assures the mapping between this identification and those used in each platform. The mapping task is assured by special wrapper. In addition, ontology is proposed to give a clear presentation of the structure of the P2P system without interesting in the content and the resource managed by the peer. The ontology is created according to the web semantic paradigm and using OWL language; so, the structure of the system is considered as a web resource.