A P2P and SOA Infrastructure for Distributed Ontology-Based Knowledge Management

The Digital Business Ecosystem Integrated Project funded by the EU aims at the development of a Europe-Wide virtual economic environment where European SMEs will advertise themselves and their service offerings with the purpose of competing, collaborating and co-evolving with other SMEs. One of the main strategic goals for this project is to model, design and implement such an environment based on observations made on biological ecosystems where several species live together, compete and co-evolve as the physical environment of the ecosystem changes. From a technical point of view, the DBE will provide a Distributed Open-Source Infrastructure which will be the glue that will bring together the European SMEs and will enable knowledge sharing and intelligent discovery of partners and services. The focus of this paper is on the Knowledge Management Infrastructure of the DBE. We firstly discuss the problem, we then present the proposed approach, and finally we identify some of the research issues that we will concentrate on.