A distance based semantic search algorithm for peer-to-peer open hypermedia systems

We consider the problem of content management in dynamically created collaborative environments. We describe the problem domain with the aid of a collaborative application in Open Hypermedia Systems, which allows individual users to share their link databases, otherwise known as linkbases. The RDF specification is utilised to express and categorise resources stored in a linkbase. This paper describes a semantic search mechanism to discover semantically related resources across such distributed linkbases. Our approach differs from the traditional crawler based search mechanism since it relies on the clustering of semantically related entities to expedite the search for resources in a randomly created network and uses distance-vector based heuristics to guide the search. Our experimental results indicate that the algorithm yields high search effectiveness in collaborative environments where changes in content published by each participant are rapid and random.