Knowledge-empowered agent negotiation for electronic commerce with knowledge beads

To automate the agent negotiation process, it has been widely accepted that two important tasks must be done: (1) formalize the negotiation process, and (2) incorporate necessary negotiation knowledge and intelligence. However, due to the fuzzy and complex nature, the lack of knowledge interoperability and knowledge-reuse in most agent-based services deployed has posed certain drawback to automated negotiation. An object-oriented ontology-based building block for knowledge representation, namely, knowledge bead (KB), has been proposed in (S. Fong, et al., 2002). It was designed as a foundation to enable automated agent negotiation in e-trading environment in a systematic way. This paper features the research work of KB on constructing its taxonomy and methodology, and the use of the knowledge carried by KB's in automated negotiation process. We anticipate the more efficient electronic commerce achieved with the support of the knowledge-empowered agent negotiation