Self-organizing a Small World by Topic

In this paper, we demonstrate how small worlds – i. e., highly clustered networks with small diameter – of peers can organize themselves in an ontology-based P2P knowledge management system. To that end, we provide rewiring strategies to build a network in which peers form clusters where they are connected to other peers interested in similar topics. These strategies only rely on the local knowledge of each peer and on the notion of similarity derived from the relationships of entities the ontology. We evaluate these algorithms and show that a small world of topically coherent clusters actually emerges, and that this improves the performance of query operations.