Ontological Matchmaking in Recommender Systems

The electronic marketplace offers great potential for the recommendation of supplies. In the so called recommender systems, it is crucial to apply matchmaking strategies that faithfully satisfy the predicates specified in the demand, and take into account as much as possible the user preferences. We focus on real-life ontology-driven matchmaking scenarios and identify a number of challenges, being inspired by such scenarios. A key challenge is that of presenting the results to the users in an understandable and clear-cut fashion in order to facilitate the analysis of the results. Indeed, such scenarios evoke the opportunity to rank and group the results according to specific criteria. A further challenge consists of presenting the results to the user in an asynchronous fashion, i.e. the 'push' mode, along with the 'pull' mode, in which the user explicitly issues a query, and displays the results. Moreover, an important issue to consider in real-life cases is the possibility of submitting a query to multiple providers, and collecting the various results. We have designed and implemented an ontology-based matchmaking system that suitably addresses the above challenges. We have conducted a comprehensive experimental study, in order to investigate the usability of the system, the performance and the effectiveness of the matchmaking strategies with real ontological datasets.Comment: 28 pages, 8 figure

Scaling U.S. Community Investing: The Investor Product Interface

"Community investing" is investment that seeks to deliver social benefits to low-income or marginalized communities while also generating a financial return. This report provides an overview of the U.S. Community Investing (USCI) field: the types of intermediary organizations raising investments and deploying them in underserved communities, the range of investment products that are available, and the types of investors active in the space. In so doing, this study surfaces several key barriers and opportunities for scaling private investment in the USCI space

Make it so! Jean-Luc Picard, Bart Simpson and the design of e-public services

In this paper, we report on a project applying participatory design methods to include people who have experience of social exclusion (in one form or another) in designing possible technologies for e-(local)-government services. The work was part of a project for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister in the UK, and was concerned with ‘access tokens’ that can provide personal identification for individuals accessing public services, based on technologies such as multi-functional smartcards, flash memory sticks, mobile phone SIMs or similar devices. In particular we report on our experience using the ‘pastiche scenarios’ technique recently developed by Mark Blythe. Our findings indicate that the technique can be effective and engaging in helping people to create realistic scenarios of future technology use and highlight some possible pitfalls to consider when using this technique.</p

Trading Application Based on Blockchain Technology

Blockchain is a growing distributed list of records that are linked using cryptographic hashes. Its robustness, simplicity, immutability and trust are basis for development of interesting innovative business solutions. Considering some use-case scenarios within the financial sector, we developed a Blockchain based trading application placed on the Cosmos network. Cosmos is a decentralized network of independent, scalable, and interoperable Blockchains, creating the foundation for new economy. Our work describes the application functionalities for buying, selling and renting goods. It shows the easiness of trading, while eliminating the third parties and demonstrates the disruptive potential of the Blockchain technologies

ProDataMarket: A data marketplace for monetizing linked data

Linked data has emerged as an interesting technology for Publishing structured data on the Web but also as a powerful mechanism for integrating disparate data sources. Various tools and approaches have been developed in the semantic Web community to produce and consume linked data, however little attention has been paid to monetization of linked data. In this paper we introduce a data marketplace – proDataMarket – that enables data providers to generate, advertise, and sell linked data, and data consumers to purchase linked data on the marketplace. The marketplace was originally designed with a focus on geospatial linked data (targeting property-related data providers and consumers) but its capabilities are generic and can be used for data in various domains. This demo will highlight the capabilities offered to the providers and consumers of the data made available on the marketplace.publishedVersio