پشتیبانی از وب معنایی برای تجارت الکترونیکی بنگاه به بنگاه چرخه زندگی پیش قرارداد

If an e-services approach to electronic commerce is to become widespread, standardisation of ontologies, message content and message protocols will be necessary. In this paper, we present a lifecycle of a business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce interaction, and show how the Semantic Web can support a service description language that can be used throughout this lifecycle. DAML+OIL is a sufficiently expressive and flexible service description language to be used not only in advertisements, but also in matchmaking queries, negotiation proposals and agreements. We also identify which operations must be carried out on this description language if the B2B lifecycle is to be fully supported. We do not propose specific standard protocols, but instead argue that our operators are able to support a wide variety of interaction protocols, and so will be fundamental irrespective of which protocols are finally adopted.

Electronic commerce is having a revolutionary effect on business. It is changing the way businesses interact with consumers, as well as the way they interact with each other. Electronic interactions are increasing the efficiency of purchasing, and are allowing increased reach across a global market. With the increasing availability of the Web, a more open e-commerce environment is developing, allowing businesses to trade more flexibly with each other. Some of this openness is achieved by competition between Web portals, while some competition occurs within a single Web portal, acting as a marketplace for buyers and sellers to meet. The e-commerce community is creating new infrastructures to support high-level business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer interactions on the Web. The effort is concentrated on defining a new generation of electronic data interchange protocols, mostly based on XML (like OASIS, BizTalk and RosettaNet) and on creating new kinds of e-business services such as agent-mediated B2B e-commerce, and knowledge-driven customer relationship management. On the other hand, with the Semantic Web initiative, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is developing a range of proposals aimed at supporting intelligent information intensive operations over the Web. The emphasis is on enriching the Web’s data markup languages with knowledge representation features, to permit inference over the content of Web pages (prominent initiatives include DAML+OIL, and RDF). Its goals include the production of Internet-scale inference mechanisms, knowledge markup languages, and active information-seeking services. The goal of this paper is to explore how Semantic Web technology can provide support to the B2B e-commerce lifecycle. In particular, we study the early (pre-contractual) phases of the lifecycle. We present a conceptual framework for modelling B2B interactions. Within it, we experiment with Semantic Web technology (in particular DAML+OIL) as a means to express semantically rich descriptions of services and goods. It is important to note that the environment here presented can be used both for automated interactions, but also to provide structured interactions between humans. This paper is structured as follows. In Section 2 we introduce our conceptual framework. In Section 3 we explore the phases of matchmaking and negotiation in detail, with particular attention to the operations that are carried out on the messages that participants exchange. In Section 4, we identify the need for a declarative language for service descriptions, derive requirements for it and show that DAML+OIL satisfies them. We also present a set of example service descriptions used at various stages in the B2B e-commerce interaction lifecycle. In Section 5, we specify the operations that are required during the B2B lifecycle, and demonstrate that they can be straightforwardly be implemented on a description logics reasoner (Section 6). We then discuss related work (Section 7) and we conclude presenting our future work intentions (Section 8).

In this paper, we have presented an analysis of the B2B e-commerce interaction lifecycle in terms of roles, information constructs and operations necessary to carry out the interactions. We have argued that a variety of protocols can be used for matchmaking and negotiation, but that the same information constructs and operations can be used to support them all. For this reason, we advocate standardization of these constructs and operations, as opposed to standardization on a single protocol. We have assessed the requirements on an appropriate service description language for this, and have argued that DAML+OIL meets these requirements. We have shown how DAML+OIL can be used to represent advertisements, queries, negotiation templates, proposals and agreements. Furthermore, and more importantly, we have shown that the key operations necessary to support B2B interactions can be expressed in terms of satisfiability and subsumption––two operations which existing description logics reasoners are capable of executing. Hence, the Semantic Web provides an ideal framework for the standardization of the B2B e-commerce interaction lifecycle. Research on automation of negotiation requires the ability to assess the likely utility of a given advertisement or negotiation proposal. In our service description language, such proposals and advertisements can be complex structures. Up to now, most work on negotiation has assumed that only one parameter (usually price) is being negotiated. Some work has been carried out on multi-attribute negotiation (e.g. [32]) but this assumes a relatively simple utility model. If we are to be able to assign utilities to complex proposals, then research on tools to help people assess the value of different proposals (preference extraction) will be necessary. It will also be necessary to represent the relative utilities of a space of possible proposals. The application of multi-attribute utility theory to negotiation [33] is a promising approach to do this. We are currently working on ways of extending this work to assign utilities to complex service descriptions. In this paper, we have not addressed the operations involved in moving from the matchmaking phase to the negotiation phase. If only one matchmaking query is made, and only one advertisement selected, then this process is straightforward: the negotiation template is taken to be the intersection between the query and the advertisement. However, if many queries are made and many advertisements are matched, then the problem becomes more complex. Clusters of potentially compatible participants must be formed, together with appropriate negotiation templates. We hope to explore this issue in the future.