Abstract

In a dynamic environment of e-commerce negotiations where transactions involve interaction among different enterprises, using different representations and terminologies, a common understanding is crucial. This paper combines the use of ontologies and agent technologies to help in solving the heterogeneity problem in e-commerce negotiations. The result is an implementation of the Ontology-based Services, which apply a methodology that assesses lexical and semantic similarity among concepts represented in different ontologies. A solution integrating the Jade platform and OWL format is presented as well as an Ontology Interaction Protocol, which is combined with the FIPA Contract Net Protocol.

Keywords: Ontology; Multi-agent system; Interoperability problem; E-commerce negotiation; Ontology mapping

Article Outline

1. Introduction

2. Agents in e-commerce

3. Heterogeneity problem in e-commerce

4. Ontology support in JADE

4.1. Integration of OWL ontologies

5. Negotiation

6. Ontology mapping

6.1. Lexical similarity identification

6.2. WordNet-based semantic similarity

6.3. N-grams for description

6.4. Calculation of the final result

7. Related work

8. Conclusion

References

This is an extension and revision of the paper “Combining Ontologies and Agents to help in Solving the Heterogeneity Problem in E-Commerce Negotiations”, presented at the International Workshop on Data Engineering Issues in E-Commerce (DEEC 2005).