Abstract. Distributed knowledge management systems (DKMS) have been suggested to meet the requirements of today’s knowledge management. Peer-to-peer systems offer technical foundations for such distributed systems. To estimate the value of P2P-based knowledge management evaluation criteria that measure the performance of such DKMS are required. We suggest a concise framework for evaluation of such systems within different usage scenarios. Our approach is based on standard measures from the information retrieval and the databases community. These measures serve as input to a general evaluation function which is used to measure the efficiency of P2P-based KM systems. We describe test scenarios as well as the simulation software and data sets that can be used for that purpose.