A multi-agent framework for a P2P data sharing facility

The paper presents a general architecture for a P2P data sharing facility within a multi-agent framework, where peers as autonomous high-level nodal agents cooperate with each other to solve global tasks. A node may have several lower level local agents including local databases and partial global ontologies. In addition there are also minder agents coordinating the activities of the peers that offer the same type of service, thus providing fault-tolerance. The ability of this architecture in data and task sharing has been demonstrated by considering query processing and directory update strategies.