An Open Distributed Middleware for the Semantic Web

The emergence of the Web2.0, Web services and the Semantic Web, have changed the WWW to an open interactive market. Heterogeneous and distributed information prosumers have to integrate data and to coordinate activities. This calls for novel middleware solutions that are compliant with the fundamental principles of the Web: persistent publication, scalability and asynchrony of communication. In earlier work we presented a semantic space-based approach, as answer to this challenge. Data is no longer queried directly via endpoint locators, but exposed via a space that offers a unified and virtual view of diverse databases. The space is accessed by use of a simple set of operations that have SPARQL-like constructs at the basis for semantic matching. In this paper we return to the proposed semantic spaces and focus on architectural issues, and describe an implementation with evaluation.