Ontologies for supporting negotiation in e-commerce

In this paper we present our experience in applying Semantic Web technology to automated negotiation. This result is a novel approach to automated negotiation, that is particularly suitable to open environments such as the Internet. In this approach, agents can negotiate in any type of marketplace regardless of the negotiation mechanism in use. In order to support a wide variety of negotiation mechanisms, protocols are not hard-coded in the agents participating to negotiations, but are expressed in terms of a shared ontology, thus making this approach particularly suitable for applications such as electronic commerce. The paper describes a novel approach to negotiation, where the negotiation protocol does not need to be hard-coded in agents, but it is represented by an ontology: an explicit and declarative representation of the negotiation protocol. In this approach, agents need very little prior knowledge of the protocol, and acquire this knowledge directly from the marketplace. The ontology is also used to tune agents' strategies to the specific protocol used. The paper presents this novel approach and describes the experience gained in implementing the ontology and the learning mechanism to tune the strategy.