Towards a Knowledge-Base for Building Complex, Proactive and Service-Oriented E-negotiation Systems

Advances in information technology change the way e-negotiations, which constitute an important aspect of worldwide e-trading, can be structured and represented. In this paper an e-negotiation framework for building complex negotiation systems with emphasis on their automation is presented. A novel approach for dynamically adapted e-negotiations, that exploits ontologies, semantic Web services, software agent platforms, service oriented architecture and knowledge-bases is described. The relationship between negotiation protocol, process and strategy specification is examined and a way of describing and representing them using a hybrid approach that integrates rules and workflow diagrams is introduced.