Email-based Negotiation to Facilitate Collaboration in SME Networks

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) typically rely on emails to interact with other SMEs in a collaborative network. However, with the use of different document standards and interpretation techniques establishing a shared understanding of business documents (or emails) can be difficult and raise interoperability issues. In this paper we introduce Commius - a zero cost enterprise system that aims to achieve seamless interoperability among collaborative SMEs. At the heart of Commius is a semantic alignment mechanism capable of automatically interpreting a document received by the system. However, when the automatic interpretation fails, Commius employs agent-inspired negotiation techniques to help achieve common understanding of the document with other Commius system (installed at sender or collaborative SME). This paper presents details of Commius´s email negotiation mechanism with the help of a running scenario that demonstrates how Commius-based negotiation can support SMEs achieve semantic alignment in collaborative networks.