Integrating semantics-based access mechanisms with P2P file systems

We present an architecture for a peer-to-peer (P2P) file system which supports semantics-based access. Central to this work is to provide semantic indexing and retrieval capabilities. Our semantic indexing and locating approach is based on distributed hash tables (DHTs) where the indices of semantically close files are clustered to the same peers with high probability (nearly 100%) by the use of locality sensitive hash functions. A query for finding semantically close files can be answered by consulting only a small number of peer nodes which are most responsible for such a query, instead of by query flooding. Our approach only adds index information to peer nodes, thus imposing only a small storage overhead. We constitute an initial step to integrate semantics-based access mechanisms into a P2P file system.