My paper "Ontology-driven Text Mining for Cost Management Processes", co-authored with Roberto Biscaro and Roberta Cuel has been accepted for pubblication, and will be presented at the SWAP 2005 (Semantic Web Application and Perspectives) Conference, held in Trento, Italy, on 14-15 December.

After introducing some basic notions about Cost Management processes and Spend Data Management practices, this paper describes a software system for the management and monitoring of enterprise purchase processes. The system enables corporate purchasers to query product catalogs written in natural language, by pre-analyzing them using text-mining techniques in order to build a structured representation of the purchasable items, based on a domain-specific ontological model. The ontology gives a simple but effective account of the notion of “functional equivalence” between items, which enables the software application to suggest to the users the most cost-effective item which satisfies their requirements.

Also, we will present another paper on a similar topic (but from a slightly different perspective, more oriented toward Economics rather than Computer Science) at iTAIS 2005 (Italian Association for Information Systems) Conference, held in Verona, Italy, on 1-2 December 2005.