Combining Intelligent Agent with the Semantic Web Services for Building an e-Commerce System

Over the years, e-commerce applications have been well researched, but the degree of automation achieved has been limited. This is probably because the current content of the Web is designed for human comprehension, rather than for computer operations. For this, we take an ontology-centred approach. Ontologies constitute the facilitating technology that enables a seamless communication between agents and services (that is, without changing their existing specifications and implementations). Ontologies are used to represent different kinds of knowledge (i.e., domain and tasks knowledge) and also to formally exhibit the service capabilities. The former is employed by agents to communicate to each other without misunderstandings. The later enables agents to automatically discover, compose and invoke the available services. Then a SEMMAS (Semantic Web services and multi-agent system), an ontology-based framework for intelligent agents and semantic Web services integration was proposed. It implements an automatic negotiation process over the semantic Web. The SEMMAS integrates a negotiation process that considers bargaining power and risk preference of negotiators. The semantic data then are used to select suppliers or to determine negotiation strategies.