SweetDeal is a rule-based approach to representation of business contracts that enables software agents to create, evaluate, negotiate, and execute contracts with substantial automation and modularity. It builds upon the situated courteous logic programs knowledge representation in RuleML, the...

Our approach for automating the negotiation of business contracts proceeds in three broad steps. First, determine the structure of the negotiation process by applying general knowledge about auctions and domain-specific knowledge about the contract subject along with preferences from potential...

This paper discusses the very early stages of a project being conducted at IBM research to explore how different rule technologies might be combined or enhanced to offer powerful business solutions. People apply many meanings to the term "business rules." In its simplest form, a business rule is...

Mappings in most federated databases are conceptualized and implemented as black-box transformations between source schemas and a federated schema. This approach does not allow specific mappings to be declared once and reused in other situations. We present an alternative approach, in which...

The prospect of combining information from diverse sources for superior decision making is plagued by the challenge of semantic heterogeneity, as data sources often adopt different conventions and interpretations when there is no coordination. An emerging solution in information integration is...

Virtually all of the existing approaches to ontology integration assume that each of the individual ontologies (and the integrated ontology) corresponds to a single set of semantics at a given time. We first claim that this single integrated view assumption is unnecessarily restrictive, and...

The shift towards global networking brings with it many opportunities and challenges. In this paper, we discuss key technologies in achieving global semantic interoperability among heterogeneous information systems, including both traditional and web data sources. In particular, we focus on the...

We address why, and especially how, to represent business rules in e-commerce contracts. By contracts, we mean descriptions of goods and services offered or sought, including ancillary agreements detailing terms of a deal. We observe that rules are useful in contracts to represent conditional...

We show how to interoperate, semantically and inferentially, between the leading Semantic Web approaches to rules (RuleML Logic Programs) and ontologies (OWL/DAML+OIL Description Logic) via analyzing their expressive intersection. To do so, we define a new intermediate knowledge representation...