Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf

One of the research fields which has recently gained much scientific interest within the database community are Peer-to-Peer databases, where peers have the autonomy to decide whether to join or to leave an information sharing environment at any time. Such volatile data nodes may appear shortly, collect or deliver some data, and disappear again. It even can not be assured that a peer joins the network ever again.
In this paper we introduce a representation format fort both, schema and data information based on the Web Ontology Language OWL. According to the advantages of the Semantic Web we are thus able to represent and to transfer every schema and data component of a database to any partner, without having to define a data and schema exchange format explicitly.