An ontology for automated negotiation

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel approach to negotiation, in which the negotiation protocol to adopt is not coded within the agents but it is expressed in terms of a common shared ontology that is shared by the agents in order to participate to a negotiation session. The negotiation ontology is defined in a way general enough to support a wide variety of market mechanisms, thus being particularly suitable for exible applications such as electronic commerce. The paper describes the negotiation ontology and provides a walkthrough example describing how the proposed approach could be used to model protocols for auctions.