1. A computer-implemented method for generating a bid invitation document and evaluating bids received, comprising: presenting a query on a display device of a bidding system to a prospective purchaser; receiving a first selection by the prospective purchaser from the query, the first selection identifying a desired item and a first linguistic term describing a degree of importance assigned to the desired item; receiving a second selection identifying an attribute of said desired item from the query, the second selection also identifying a second linguistic term describing a degree of importance assigned to the attribute; receiving a third selection identifying a first value for said attribute, the third selection also identifying a third linguistic term describing a degree of satisfaction assigned to the first value for the attribute; generating, by a processing server of the bidding system, said bid invitation document using responses to the queries and the selections; electronically submitting said bid invitation document to prospective suppliers to notify said suppliers of the opportunity to submit a bid responsive to said bid invitation document; and upon receipt of a bid, retrieving each attribute from the bid, determining whether the retrieved attribute is a discrete attribute or a continuous attribute, the discrete attribute being associated with a discrete quantitative value and the continuous attribute being associated with two closest discrete values, for a discrete attribute, retrieving the discrete quantitative value associated with the discrete attribute, for a continuous attribute, calculating a quantitative value by calculating contribution of the closest discrete quantitative values associated with the continuous attribute; generating a quantitative degree of satisfaction value for the bid, the quantitative degree of satisfaction value of the bid being computed using a weighted method that takes account of a defuzzified weight for importance of the desired item, a defuzzified weight for the attribute of the desired item, and the discrete quantitative value for a discrete attribute or the calculated quantitative for a continuous attribute; and generating a linguistic result to be presented to the prospective purchaser, the linguistic result being based on the quantitative degree of satisfaction value.