Application of a semantic product matching mechanism in open tendering e-marketplaces

Abstract

Purpose

Searching the tender notices that publish every day in open tendering websites is a common way for finding business opportunity in public procurement. The heterogeneity of tender notices from various tendering marketplaces is a challenge for exploiting semantic technologies in the tender search.

Design/methodology/approach

Most of the semantic matching approaches require the data to be structured and integrated according to a data model. But the integration process can be expensive and time-consuming especially for multi-source data integration.

Findings

In this paper, a product search mechanism that had been developed in an e-procurement platform for matching product e-catalogues is applied to the tender search problem. The search performance has been compared using two procurement vocabularies on searching tender notices from two major tender resources.

Originality/value

The test results show that the matching mechanism is able to find tender notices from heterogeneous resources and different classification systems without transforming the tenders to a uniform data model.

Citation

Mehrbod, A., Zutshi, A., Grilo, A. and Jardim-Gonsalves, R. (2018), "Application of a semantic product matching mechanism in open tendering e-marketplaces", Journal of Public Procurement, Vol. 18 No. 1, pp. 14-30. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOPP-03-2018-002