Semantic Web support for the business-to-business e-commerce pre-contractual lifecycle

If an e-services approach to electronic commerce is to become widespread, standardisation of ontologies, message content and message protocols will be necessary. In this paper, we present a lifecycle of a business-to-business e-commerce interaction, and show how the Semantic Web can support a service description language that can be used throughout this lifecycle. DAML+OIL is a sufficiently expressive and flexible service description language to be used not only in advertisements, but also in matchmaking queries, negotiation proposals and agreements. We also identify which operations must be carried out on this description language if the B2B lifecycle is to be fully supported. We do not propose specific standard protocols, but instead argue that our operators are able to support a wide variety of interaction protocols, and so will be fundamental irrespective of which protocols are finally adopted.