Semantic and syntactic matching of e-catalogues: Using Vector Space Model

E-catalogues play a key role in e-procurement. Matching a product request from a buyer with products e-catalogues, helps companies to find business partners in e-marketplaces. Plethora of e-catalogue standards and enterprise specific formats is one of the major challenges in the matching process. In addition to this syntactic heterogeneity, the same product concept can be expressed using different words that causes semantic diversity in e-catalogues. In this paper, we propose a flexible approach to e-catalogue matching using Vector Space Model. Each e-catalogue is interpreted syntactically in its schema and semantically in an ontology that is developed based on its product classification system. Schemas and ontologies are added to the VSM by adding the syntax of the structure and semantic of the ontology to the indexing and searching mechanisms. The matching process uses the syntactic and semantic metadata for interpreting each e-catalogue as much as the information is available for the system, but is not dependent on this information.