Towards semantic-based P2P reputation systems

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems represent nowadays a large portion of Internet traffic, and are fundamental data sources. In a pure P2P system, since no peer has the power or responsibility to monitor and restrain others behaviours, there is no method to verify the trustworthiness of shared resources, and malicious peers can spread untrustworthy data objects to the system. Furthermore, data descriptions are often simple features directly connected to data or annotations based on heterogeneous schemas, a fact that makes difficult to obtain a single coherent trust value on a resource. This chapter describes techniques where the combination of Semantic Web and peer-to-peer technologies is used for expressing the knowledge shared by peers in a well-defined and formal way. Finally, dealing with Semantic-based P2P networks, the chapter suggests a research effort in this direction, where the association between cluster-based overlay networks and reputation systems based on numerical approaches seems to be promising. © 2009, IGI Global.