Concept abduction and contraction for semantic-based discovery of matches and negotiation spaces in an e-marketplace

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In this paper, we present a Description Logic approach – fully compliant with the Semantic web vision and technologies – to extended matchmaking between demands and supplies in a semantic-enabled Electronic Marketplace, which allows the semantic-based treatment of negotiable and strict requirements in the demand/supply descriptions. 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, which allow 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. Both the algorithms and the semantic-based approach are novel, and enable a mechanism to boost logic-based discovery and negotiation stages within an e-marketplace. A set of simple experiments confirm the validity of the approach.