The EASTWEB project is among the sponsors of

 

Ontology matching is a key interoperability enabler for the Semantic Web, since it takes the ontologies as input and determines as output correspondences between the semantically related entities of those ontologies. These correspondences can be used for various tasks, such as ontology merging, query answering, data translation, or for navigation on the Semantic Web. Thus, matching ontologies enables the knowledge and data expressed in the matched ontologies to interoperate.

One challenge of service coordination in the semantic Web is concerned with how to best connect the ultimate service requester with the ultimate service provider? Like intermediaries in the physical economy, a special kind of software agents, so called middle-agents, is supposed to solve this problem based on the declarative characterization of the capabilities of both service requester and provider agents. In fact, the standard Web service interaction life cycle corresponds to the classical service matchmaking process.
More generally, resource retrieval extends the notion of service matchmaking to the process of discovering any kind of resource (services, data, information, knowledge) for given settings, participating entities, and purposes. It is at the core of several scenarios in the Semantic Web area, spanning from web-services, grid computing, and Peer-to-Peer computing, to applications such as e-commerce, human resource management, or social networks applications such as mating and dating services.