Establishing Service Communities in Peer-to-Peer Networks

The increasing device heterogeneity and mobility in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks make flexible and context-aware middleware approaches necessary to enable the user to benefit from this trend. Current approaches regarding ad hoc service or device interworking basically focus on seamlessly connecting discovered device functionality that is normally defined in respective static descriptions. At the same time, Web 2.0 technologies exemplify the success of collaboration based work, whereas the considered community aspects and interworking remain on user and data level only. In this paper, we propose an approach that expands the integration of community aspects to the service layer to enable a seamless interworking of different devices and services by applying semantics and Web 2.0 principles to P2P environments. The notion of universal service terminals is presented being able to process semantic user requests by means of multiple cooperating devices. Regarding this, a distributed blackboard approach is utilized to facilitate an active information exchange enabling a best-effort treatment of the user´s goal and enhancing common functionality such as service discovery. Special emphasis is put on the support of handheld devices.