Partial Matchmaking for complex Product and Service Descriptions

Matchmaking between offers and requests is an essential mechanism in electronic market places. Description Logics have been proposed as a appropriate framework for representing offers and requests and standard methods from description logics reasoning have been proposed for computing matches. We argue that classical reasoning is not well suited for realistic scenarios as it does not allow to compute partial matches and qualify the mismatch. We propose a more flexible approach for matching complex product and service descriptions based on the notion of approximate subsumption in expressive description logics and present a prototypical implementation of our matching system.