Recent efforts in the area of Web policy languages show concerns on how to better represent both context and rules of a domain to deal with large number of resources and users. Interaction between domains with different business rules is also another questionable issue in this same area. Web rule languages have been recently introduced as a means to facilitate interaction between parties with d...

In order to automate verification process, regulatory rules written in natural language needs to be translated into a format that machines can understand. However, none of the existing formalisms can fully represent the elements that appear in legal norms. For instance, most of these formalisms do not provide features to capture the behavior of deontic effects, which is an important aspect in a...

Crisis management is a critical task requiring a deep knowledge of the related scenario where usually interoperability and collaboration among different services and actors take place. To support crisis management a promising approach is based on simulation and analysis. Precondition to them is the possibility to model both structural and behavioural aspects of the addressed domain. In a previo...

A general web rule (markup) language has several purposes. It may serve as a lingua franca to exchange rules between different systems and tools. It may be used to express derivation rules for enriching web ontologies by adding definitions of derived concepts or for defining data access permissions; to describe and publish the reactive behaviour of a system in the form of reaction rules; and to...

E-Commerce enabled new ways of transactions. Companies and individuals negotiate and make contracts every day. Practically, contracts are agreements between parties that must be kept. These agreements affect the involved parties irretrievably. Hence, negotiating them efficiently is proved vital. To this end we propose the use of intelligent agents, which benefit from Semantic Web technologies, ...

Recently Web services have become a key technology which is indispensable for e-business due to its ability to provide the desired information or service regardless of time and place by integrating current application systems within a single business or between multiple businesses with standardized technologies using the open network and Internet. However, the current Web Services Retrieval Sys...

and Introduction A key challenge in e-commerce is to specify the terms of the deal between buyers and sellers, e.g., pricing and description of goods/services. In previous work [cite EC-99, CI-02], we have developed an approach that automates such business contracts by representing and communicating them as modular logic-program rules. That approach, now called SweetDeal, builds upon our situat...

Comparison shopping allows customers to reduce time and effort when searching for product information and prices. However, traditional comparison sites mainly compare product prices without using precise information on delivery cost. To overcome this limitation, we adopted a rule-based comparison shopping framework using the eXtensible Rule Markup Language (XRML) architecture, which computes th...

This thesis proposes a weighted DAG (wDAG) similarity algorithm for match-making in e-Business environments. We focus on the metadata representation of buyer and seller agents, as well as a similarity and associated simplicity measure over this information. In order to make the interaction between agents more meaningful and fine-grained, we choose node-labeled, arc-labeled and arc-weighted dire...

This paper presents DR-DEVICE, a system for defeasible reasoning on the Web. Defeasible reasoning is a rule-based approach for efficient reasoning with incomplete and inconsistent information. Such reasoning is, among others, useful for ontology integration, where conflicting information arises naturally; and for the modeling of business rules and policies, where rules with exceptions are often...