David Trastour, Claudio Bartolini and Javier Gonzalez-Castillo have written an interesting paper titled A Semantic Web Approach to Service Description for Matchmaking of Services. The paper (350k) is a super-geeky look at what will undoubtedly become a key technology driving a future version of online dating infrastructure. Give it to your CTO and watch them smile.
Abstract. Matchmaking is an important aspect of e-commerce interactions. Advanced matchmaking services require rich and flexible metadata that are not supported by currently available industry standard frameworks for e-commerce such as UDDI and ebXML. The semantic web initiative at W3C is gaining momentum and generating technologies and tools that might help bridge the gap between the current standard solutions and the requirement for advanced matchmaking services. In this paper we examine the problem of matchmaking, highlighting the features that a matchmaking service should exhibit and deriving requirements on metadata for description of services from a matchmaking point of view. We then assess a couple of standard frameworks for e-commerce against these requirements. Finally, we report on our experience of developing a semantic web based matchmaking prototype. In particular, we present our views on usefulness, adequacy, maturity and tool support of semantic web related technologies such as RDF and DAML.
