Enhancing Interoperability: Ontology-Mapping in an Electronic Institution

• Author(s): Henrique Lopes Cardoso ; Daniel Dinis Teixeira ; Eugénio Oliveira
• Date: 2009
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10216/16173
• Origin: Repositório Aberto da Universidade do Porto
• Subject(s): Ciências Tecnológicas; Engenharia; Engenharia electrónica
• Document Type: Part of book or chapter of book
• Language: English

Description

The automation of B2B processes requires a high level of interoperability between potentially disparate systems. We model such systems using software agents (representing enterprises), which interact using specific protocols. When considering open environments, interoperability problems are even more challenging. Addressing business automation as a task that intends to align businesses through a tight integration of processes may not be desirable, because business relationships may be temporary and dynamic. Furthermore, openness implies heterogeneity of technologies, processes, and even domain ontologies. After discussing these issues, this paper presents, in the context of an Electronic Institution, an ontology-mapping service that enables the automation of negotiation protocols when agents may use different ontologies to represent their domain knowledge. The ontology-mapping service employs two approaches used for lexical and semantic similarity, namely N-Grams and WordNet, and poses few requirements on the ontologies’ representation format. Examples are provided that illustrate the integration of ontology-mapping with automated negotiation.