SMART — A Semantic Matchmaking Portal for Electronic Markets

Abstract

Searching and comparing products in electronic markets is still a challenging problem. On one hand, the expressive power of the search mechanisms offered by the existing electronic markets is too limited. On the other hand, the price is mostly the only criterium of comparing the results with each other. In this paper, we introduce SMART (semantic matchmaking portal) to improve searching and comparing products in electronic markets. Therefore, we present a novel matchmaking approach based on fuzzy descriptions that provide a more expressive search mechanism that is closer to human reasoning and aggregates multiple search criteria to a single value (ranking of an offer relative to the query), thus enabling better selection of offers that should be considered for the negotiation.