A Framework for Semantic Gossiping

Today the problem of semantic interoperability in information search on the Internet is solved mostly by means of centralization, both at a sys-tem and at a logical level. This approach has been successful to a certain extent. Peer-to-peer systems as a new brand of system architectures indicate that the principle of decentralization might offer new solutions to many problems that scale well to very large numbers of users. In this paper we outline how the peer-to-peer system architectures can be applied to tackle the problem of semantic interoperability in the large, driven in a bottom-up manner by the participat-ing peers. Such a system can readily be used to study semantic interoperability as a global scale phenomenon taking place in a social network of information sharing peers.