Information Integration for Electronic Commerce

Abstract

In agent-mediated electronic commerce, agents need to exchange information with other agents and to integrate the information obtained from other agents in their own information. Integration is a very complex task as: information is distributed among different agents; each agent autonomously represents and manages a piece of information; information might be partial, as agent cannot wait to have complete information before acting; finally information is redundant, as the same information might be represented by two different agents. The goal of this paper is to provide a formal semantics for information integration able to cope with distributed, autonomous, partial, and redundant information. In the paper we introduce two examples from an electronic commerce scenario which emphasize critical problems in the integration of information, we define a semantics for information integration, and we test its adequacy by formalizing the examples.

The work with Fausto Giunchiglia about contexts has provided many of the intu- itions and motivations underlying the work described in this paper. We thank the Mechanized Reasoning Group at DISA (University of Trento), ITC-IRST (Tren- to) This work is part of the MRG project Distributed Representations and Systems (http://www.cs.unitn.it/~mrg/distributed-intelligence/).