Semantic Matchmaking of Web Resources with Local Closed-World Reasoning

Ontology languages like OWL allow for semantically rich annotation of resources, such as products advertised at an electronic online marketplace, while the Description Logic (DL) formalism underlying OWL provides reasoning techniques to perform matchmaking on such annotations. We identify peculiarities in the use of DL inferences for matchmaking which are due to the open-world semantics of OWL, and we analyse the use of local closed-world reasoning for its applicability to matchmaking. In particular, we investigate two nonmonotonic extensions to DL, namely autoepistemic DLs and DLs with circumscription, for their suitability of realising local closed-world reasoning in the matchmaking context to overcome these problems. We discuss their different characteristics by means of an elaborate example of an electronic marketplace for PC product catalogues from the eCommerce domain and demonstrate how these formalisms can be used to realise such scenarios.