Semantic Flooding: Semantic Search across Distributed Lightweight Ontologies

Lightweight ontologies are trees where links between nodes codify the fact that a node lower in the hierarchy describes a topic (and contains documents about this topic) which is more specific than the topic of the node one level above. In turn, multiple lightweight ontologies can be connected by semantic links which represent mappings among them and which can be computed, e.g., by ontology matching. In this paper we describe how these two types of links can be used to define a semantic overlay network which can cover any number of peers and which can be flooded to perform a semantic search on documents, i.e., to perform semantic flooding. We have evaluated our approach by simulating a network of 10,000 peers containing classifications which are fragments of the DMoz web directory. The results are promising and show that, in our approach, only a relatively small number of peers needs to be queried in order to achieve high accuracy.