A Conversational Component-Based Open Multi-agent Architecture for Flexible Information Trading

In a competitive market environment, information service providers try to differentiate their offerings by adopting new kinds of interactions with information consumers. The standardization of languages and interaction protocols used in messages among information agents in electronic commerce frustrates the needs of service providers as they attempt to differentiate their offerings. In this paper a multi-agent architecture (where conversational components are used as the main tool for interactions among participating agents) is proposed to allow an information consumer agent to interact with an information provider agent that supplies a service via an unknown language or interaction protocol.