How Semantic Web Technologies can Support the Mediation between Supply and Demand in the ICT Market: The Case of Customer Relationship Management

This chapter presents the ARNEIS framework, i.e., an architecture enabling intelligent Web-based repositories of descriptions of software products and services. ARNEIS exploits semantic Web technologies in order to support the interaction between ICT companies offering software solutions for business automation, and small-to-medium sized enterprises looking for technological support to their business. In particular, we chose Customer Relationship Management (CRM) as a field for the evaluation of the framework, and thus in this chapter we describe how the ARNEIS framework enables a Web-based service that supports an intelligent matching between supply and demand for CRM-related tools. After presenting the background of the project and discussing related work, the chapter describes the ARNEIS framework, starting from its architecture and user interaction flow. The domain analysis of the CRM field and role of ontologies is then discussed. The chapter then focuses on the user interfaces and matching between semantic descriptions of offers and needs. A brief discussion of future challenges concludes the chapter.