A Semantic Web Approach to Service Description for Matchmaking of Services David Trastour, Claudio Bartolini, Javier Gonzalez-Castillo Trusted E-Services Laboratory HP Laboratories Bristol HPL-2001-183 July 30 th , 2001* E-mail: david_trastour@hp.com , claudio_bartolini@hp.com , javgon@hplb.hpl.hp.com semantic web, e-commerce, matchmaking services, automated negotiation, electronic marketplaces, ontology 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. * Internal Accession Date Only Approved for External Publication  Copyright Hewlett-Packard Company 2001