A software framework for matchmaking based on semantic Web technology

The semantic Web can make e-commerce interactions more flexible and automated by standardizing ontologies, message content, and message protocols. This paper investigates how semantic and Web Services technologies can be used to support service advertisement and discovery in e-commerce. In particular, it describes the design and implementation of a service matchmaking prototype that uses a DAML-S based ontology and a description logic reasoner to compare ontology-based service descriptions. By representing the semantics of service descriptions, the matchmaker enables the behavior of an intelligent agent to approach more closely that of a human user trying to locate suitable Web services. The performance of this prototype implementation was tested in a realistic agent-based e-commerce scenario.