Ontological Approach for E-Services

Information sharing is crucial to the success of business applications in a collaborative environment. This paper presents a novel approach for information sharing which is suitable for distributed computing. Agent technologies are applied to cope with service agents´ on and off and to provide semantic support for implementation of complex e-business applications that may span diverse organisations. A finite state machine (FSM), which is ideally suited for modelling business processes, is investigated to facilitate process automation. Our approach aims to support dynamic information sharing and reuse in e-business applications. A case study illustrates our ontological approach in employing FSM agents in an inter-organisational environment. A demonstration integrating the JADE platform and frame-based ontologies is also presented.