Distributed data sources which employ taxonomy hierarchy to describe the contents of their objects are considered, and a super-peer-based semantic overlay network （SSON） is proposed for sharing and searching their data objects. In SSON, peers are dynamically clustered into many semantic clusters based on the semantics of their data objects and organized in the semantic clusters into a semantic overlay network. Each semantic cluster consists of a super-peer and more peers, and is only responsible for answering queries in its semantic subspace. A query is first routed to the appropriate semantic clusters by an efficient searching algorithm, and then it is forwarded to the specific peers that hold the relevant data objects. Experimental results indicate that SSON has good scalability and achieves a competitive trade-off between search efficiency and costs.
