New trends on e-Procurement applying semantic technologies

The present editorial note introduces the concept of e-Procurement and the use of semantic technologies to improve some of the processes involved in electronic purchasing processes. Currently there is a growing interest to boost the use of electronic communications to deal with Business-to-Business (B2B), Business-to-Consumer (B2C) or Administration-to-Administration (A2A) relationships. New technologies are emerging with the aim of: (1) reducing costs; (2) providing more intelligent environments to make decisions in more timely and accurate fashion and (3) improving the overall efficiency of business processes. More specifically, e-Procurement defined as the business to business purchase and sale of supplies over the Internet can be found in a variety of ways from public marketplaces involving many firms to private exchanges that are currently facing a challenging environment to migrate from paper-based systems to an electronic ecosystem. However several interlinked challenges to achieve a successful transition have been identified such as lack of interoperable and standard-based infrastructures (data and services), legal uncertainties including the necessity of improving trust, privacy and provenance of data and information and lack of transparency, accessibility or usability to name a few. In this context semantic-based technologies arise to afford a common and standard data model that eases the interoperability, integration and creation of knowledge-based systems. Taking into account the necessity of a more interoperable and intelligent system to manage e-Procurement processes and the emerging application of semantics in different domains, this special issue is intended to provide researchers, developers and practitioners a summary of the current status of e-Procurement applying semantics.