Semantic matchmaking in a P-2-P electronic marketplace

Matchmaking is the problem of matching offers and requests, such as supply and demand in a marketplace, services and customers in a service agency, etc., where both partners are peers in the transaction. Peer-to-Peer (P-2-P) e-commerce calls for an infrastructure treating in a uniform way supply and demand, which should base the match on a common ontology for describing both supply and demand. Knowledge representation --- in particular description logics --- can deal with this uniform treatment of knowledge from vendors and customers, by modelling both as generic concepts to be matched. We propose a logical approach to supply-demand matching in P-2-P e-commerce, which allows us to clearly distinguish between exact, potential and partial match, and to define a ranking within the categories. The approach is deployed in a prototype system implemented for a particular case study (but easily generalizable) and is based on Classic, a well-known knowledge representation system.