Agent Models and Different User Ontologies for an Electronic Market Place

Abstract

In this paper the agent-based electronic market architecture GEMS is described. The market incorporates different user perspectives: consumers, retailers, and producers. Ontologies for the different user perspectives are included. Knowledge is included to relate information from the different perspectives; for example, evaluation knowledge that can be used to derive product evaluations in terms of user ontology from product information based on producer ontology. Agent models are used as a high-level design structure for the architecture. It is shown how this combination of agent models, ontologies and knowledge provides an adequate approach to the distributed and knowledge-intensive character of the application.