A Collective Knowledge System for Business Partner Co-operation

In recent years, merchants have increased their interest in marketing strategies based on loyalty programs. Coalition loyalty is one of the most profitable among the aforementioned strategies. This work proposes a co-operation model based on the principles of Collective Knowledge Systems and on Semantic Technologies to support the generation and management of dynamic coalitions of merchants. The main benefit of the proposed model is represented by the possibility, for merchants, to match their needs and define coalition programs (based on conditional coupon) without the involvement of mediators. Moreover, the model provides the capability of defining collaboratively and formally the aforementioned coupons that can be handled by means of technologies for payment and value added services. The proposed model is defined in the context of the TITAN Project aiming at defining an integrated service-oriented Software Platform enabling innovative business scenarios for e-money, e-payments and value added services.