Janina Fengel

A reputation system for electronic negotiations

In this paper we first present a system architecture enabling market participants to carry out bilateral and multi-attributive electronic negotiations with each other. Since this system uses open and anonymous communication networks, market participants have to cope with much higher mount of uncertainty about the quality of products and the trustworthiness of other participants. Therefore, we present a reputation system, which facilitates trust building among business partners who interact in an ad-hoc manner with each other. The system enables market participants to rate the business performance of their partners as well as the quality of offered goods. These ratings are the basis for evaluating the trustworthiness of market participants and the quality of their goods. The ratings are aggregated using the concept of Web of Trust. This approach leads to robustness of the proposed system against malicious behavior aiming at manipulating the reputation of market participants.

Semantics-Based Business Process Model Similarity

Business process modeling has become an accepted means for designing and describing business operations. As a result, comparing and aligning business process models within and between organizations is increasingly important. However, due to differing use of modeling languages and domain languages for labeling models and their elements, model comparison is a non-trivial task. Presently, it is to be performed manually. For easing this workload, we present a novel approach for determining semantic similarity in an automated manner, directed at supporting business analysis through semantic reasoning.

Semantic Synchronization in B2B Transactions

Despite the development of e-business standards, the integration of business processes and business information systems is still a non-trivial issue if business partners use different e-business standards for formatting and describing information to be processed. Since those standards can be understood as ontologies, ontological engineering technologies can be applied for processing, especially ontology matching for reconciling them. However, as e-business standards tend to be rather large-scale ontologies, scalability is a crucial requirement. To serve this demand, we present our ORBI Ontology Mediator. It is linked with our Malasco system for partition-based ontology matching with currently available matching systems, which so far do not scale well, if at all. In our case study we show how to provide dynamic semantic synchronization between business partners using different e-business standards without initial ramp-up effort, based on ontological mapping technology combined with interactive user participation.

Semantische Synchronisationsdienste zur dynamischen Informationsintegration im elektronischen Geschäftsverkehr

ZusammenfassungenHerkömmliche Projekte der Anwendungs-und Datenintegration befassen sich in der Regel mit statischen Integrationsproblemen. Daten-und Anwendungsstrukturen verändern sich dabei während und nach Abschluss des Integrationsprojektes nicht. In diesen Fällen lassen sich Strukturen und Inhalte mittels statischer Übersetzungstabellen ausreichend zueinander in Beziehung setzen. IT-Systeme und Daten für Geschäftsprozesse mit höherem Dynamikanteil —etwa im Rahmen elektronischer Markttransaktionen — lassen sich auf diese Weise jedoch nicht zufriedenstellend integrieren. In diesem Beitrag wird eine Anwendung auf Basis von Web-Services vorgestellt, die durch Auswertung der Semantik ausgetauschter Informationen auch dynamischen Integrationssituationen gewachsen ist. Für den elektronischen Datenaustausch ermittelt und adaptiert die Anwendung weitgehend eigenständig semantische Beziehungen sowohl für Datenstrukturen als auch für Dateninhalte, ohne dass dazu aufwendige Vorarbeiten notwendig werden. Für das selbstlernende Synchronisationssystem werden Methoden des Ontological Engineering und der künstlichen Intelligenz eingesetzt. Am Beispiel elektronischer Verhandlungsprozesse werden die Integrationsmöglichkeiten praktisch demonstriert.