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The SWAP Data and Metadata Model for Semantics-Based Peer-to-Peer Systems 2 2 1 2 Marc Ehrig , Peter Haase , Ronny Siebes , Steffen Staab , Heiner 1 2 2 Stuckenschmidt , Rudi Studer , Christoph Tempich 1Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam {ronny, heiner}@cs.vu.nl 2Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe, D-76128 Karlsruhe {ehrig,haase,staab,studer,tempich}@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de Abstract. Peer-to-Peer systems are a new paradigm for information sharing and some systems have successfully been deployed. It has been argued that current Peer-to-Peer systems suffer from the lack of seman- tics. The SWAP project (Semantic Web and Peer-to-Peer) 1 aims at overcoming this problem by combining the Peer-to-Peer paradigm with Semantic Web technologies. In this paper, we propose a data model for encoding semantic information that combines features of ontologies (con- cept hierarchies, relational structures) with a flexible description and rat- ing model that allows us to handle heterogeneous and even contradictory views on the domain of interest. We discuss the role of this model in the SWAP environment and describe the model as well as its application. 1 Motivation The essence of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) is that nodes in the network directly exploit resources present at other nodes of the network without intervention of any central server. The tremendous success of networks like Napster and Gnutella [1], and of highly visible industry initiatives such as Sun’s JXTA [2] , as well as the Peer-to-Peer Working Group including HP, IBM and Intel, have sh