Advancements in Meaning Negotiation for Enhanced Semantic Collaboration in Information Systems

Abstract

Pragmatic Web emerges from Semantic Web to empower human-computer collaboration. The majority of methods rely on knowledge exchange and reuse through ontologies and rules, leading to the development of interactive systems through distributed multiagent systems over the web. Meaning negotiation becomes crucial for agents to reach a consensus on the meaning of concepts within a domain. Various approaches have been suggested to enhance the pragmatics of the web through meaning negotiation. In this scope, Aldo de Moor’s pragmatic web model integrates contextual and domain ontologies in a case study. The model explores the potential of ontology merging to enhance the meaning of negotiation. Ontology merging streamlines communication by reducing negotiation steps, and fostering more efficient collaboration across diverse domains. This paper explores the potential of Aldo de Moor's pragmatic web model to improve the meaning negotiation process in multiple domains. To assess the efficacy of merging ontologies in meaning negotiation, the authors designed 123 scenarios applicable to 30 different domain ontologies. These scenarios encompassed various contextual situations, simulating real-world interactions between agents. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated in this paper through an example in the e-recruitment domain. The result demonstrated a statistically significant reduction in negotiation steps when using the merged ontology compared to traditional methods. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov test revealed an 87% reduction (p-value < 0.05), highlighting the effectiveness of the approach.