The Sharing Economy with the central theme of "access over ownership" gains popularity and is receiving a lot of coverage by the media. Companies like UBER, AIRBNB and BLABLACAR are valued in the billions and enable individuals to act as private taxi drivers, rent out their apartments or participate in ridesharing. Besides those prominent companies, there are platforms that facilitate the sharing of tools, miscellaneous types of equipment, 3D printers and even pets. A peer searching for a specific resource to borrow needs to at first identify relevant websites and then look through various offers to find an appropriate one. This laborious process can be eased by making use of Semantic Web technologies. Using the Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM), we synthesize the characteristics of various exemplary Sharing Economy websites with regard to the description of resources and services that can be shared including the transaction details and other relevant components. Following up, core concepts serving as a foundation for the conceptualization and the design of a description language in the form of an ontology are derived. The description language is based on Semantic Web technologies to enable efficient semantic search and matchmaking using established standards like RDF(S), OWL, and SPARQL. The underlying idea is to abstract from proprietary implementations in order to provide a common ground for service description in the domain of the Sharing Economy. Thus, a search against multiple websites could be facilitated to improve the discoverability and comparability of individual offers on different websites.
