Community Driven Requests for Proposals - Applying Semantics to Match Customer Purchase Intents to Vendor Offers

This paper presents a platform for requests for proposals and describes how ontologies drive the different components: the creation of a proposal, the annotation of vendor data, the transformation of vendor data into other formats and the semantic matching of a proposal against annotated vendor data. The ontology construction started from DOGMA, a methodology with its grounding in the linguistic representation of knowledge that is suitable for community participation in the creation process. The ontologies were created in a modular way, with general product and meta-models that can be extended depending on the domain. In the case of the pilot, the product were holiday packages, more precisely winter sports holiday packages.