An Ontology Solution for Language Interoperability between Negotiation Agents

Traditional negotiation systems have been implemented using agent architectures, where agents communicate exchanging negotiation primitives generated by each system, based on particular language definitions implicitly encoded, giving different syntax and semantics to their messages. In this paper we address the problem of communicating heterogeneous negotiation agents in a Web-based environment, considering differences in their message implementations. Our research is based in the development of a shared ontology for publishing definitions of negotiation primitives, and a translator module, which is executed only when a misunderstanding occurs. We implemented a service-oriented architecture for executing negotiations and conducted experiments incorporating heterogeneous agents. The results of the tests show that the proposed solution improves communication between negotiation agents.