A system for principled Matchmaking in an electronic marketplace

More and more resources are becoming available on the Web, and there is a growing need for infrastructures that, based on advertised descriptions, can match demands with supplies in an electronic marketplace. Several matchmakers rely on simple keyword matching, but significant matching results can only be obtained by exploiting the semantics inherent in structured descriptions. To this end, a novel knowledge representation approach is proposed, based on description logics, that is superior to both keyword-and basic subsumption-based matchmaking. The properties a matchmaker should have are formalized, and a matchmaking facilitator, compliant with the desired properties, is presented. The system embeds a NeoClassic reasoner whose structural subsumption algorithm has been modified to allow match categorization into potential and partial, and ranking of matches within categories. Experiments show good correspondence between users and system rankings.