Semantic Matchmaking as Non-Monotonic Reasoning: A Description Logic
  Approach
  Matchmaking arises when supply and demand meet in an electronic marketplace,
or when agents search for a web service to perform some task, or even when
recruiting agencies match curricula and job profiles. In such open
environments, the objective of a matchmaking process is to discover best
available offers to a given request. We address the problem of matchmaking from
a knowledge representation perspective, with a formalization based on
Description Logics. We devise Concept Abduction and Concept Contraction as
non-monotonic inferences in Description Logics suitable for modeling
matchmaking in a logical framework, and prove some related complexity results.
We also present reasonable algorithms for semantic matchmaking based on the
devised inferences, and prove that they obey to some commonsense properties.
Finally, we report on the implementation of the proposed matchmaking framework,
which has been used both as a mediator in e-marketplaces and for semantic web
services discovery.
