Abstract
Semantic web services have recently appeared as an enabling technology for the challenging task of automated service discovery and composition. In addition, the growing number of web services demands for distributed discovery mechanisms which do not suffer of the scalability problems of the centralized ones. A framework based on the P2P paradigm to enhance the service discovery process has been designed: it is mainly based on the grouping of peers which are semantically "close" to each other. In this paper, we focus on the semantic characterization of a peer, which is built by taking into account the set of services it provides. In order to reach an high level of service integration, our framework builds an abstract "expertise" of the peer, which is independent of the specific semantic language used to annotate the service.