Concept Abduction and Contraction for Semantic-based Discovery of Matches and Negotiation Spaces in an E-Marketplace

In this paper we present a Description Logic approach to extended matchmaking between Demands and Supplies in an Electronic Marketplace, which allows the semantic-based treatment of negotiable and strict requirements in the description.To this aim we exploit two novel non-standard Description Logic inference services, Concept Contraction -which extends satisfiability-and Concept Abduction -which extends subsumption.Based on these services we devise algorithms to find negotiation spaces and to determine the quality of a possible match, also in the presence of a distinction between strictly required and optional elements.