State of the art in negotiation ontologies for enhancing business intelligence

Abstract

Negotiation is defined as two or more agents making agreement on the common interests, which provides an efficient approach for companies to gain business intelligence from suppliers and customers. Current negotiation research focuses on automatically stimulating negotiation behaviors among agents. Ontology, as a modeling technology in semantic web, is regarded as an effective tool to improve the negotiation ability of agents, considering that ontology can provide richer semantic expressions for agents in negotiation process. In this paper, we make a brief review on the current negotiation ontology researches. In addition, by means of a unique ontology notation system, we unify the notations used in these ontologies, to maximally promote knowledge sharing outcome in this field. By comparing and contrasting the ontologies from five perspectives, we draw a brief conclusion to the present status of negotiation ontology researches, and make our suggestions to the further research in this field.