Facilitating e-Negotiation Processes with Semantic Web Technologies

Semantic Web technologies have recently been maturing to make e-commerce interactions and cross-organizational processes more flexible and automated. Ontology has also been developed in various business domains. However, researches in Semantic Web have largely focused on the facilitation of successful matchmaking but not much on the negotiation upon matchmaking failures and exceptions. In this paper, we propose a novel application of Semantic Web technologies for the facilitation of e-Negotiation processes. We discuss how the elicitation of negotiation issues, alternatives, and tradeoff can be streamlined. We further propose a novel methodology for the elicitation of dependencies among negotiation issues so that negotiators can focus on tradeoff among inter-related issues, instead of arguing about single issues. A negotiation plan can thus be derived to observe negotiation orders across different issues. As a result, negotiators can have a better cognition of their negotiation tasks and the overall e-Negotiation process can be streamlined. We are extending a negotiation support system to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, which is the most useful to repeatable and semi-structured negotiations in business-to-business (B2B) e-Commerce and e-Marketplace envi-ronments.