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/).
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
S. Abitebul, R. Hull, and V. Vianu. Foundation of Databases. Addison-Wesley, 1995.
H.A. Blair and V.S. Subrahmanian. Paraconsistent Logic Programming. Theoretical Computer Science, 68:35–51, 1987.
A. Borgida. Description Logics in Data Management. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, October 1995.
T. Catarci and M. Lenzerini. Representing and using interschema knowledge in cooperative information systems. International Journal of Intelligent and Cooperative Information Systems, 2(4):375–398, 1993.
A. Cimatti and L. Serafini. Multi-Agent Reasoning with Belief Contexts II: Elaboration Tolerance. In Proc. 1st Int. Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS-95), pages 57–64, 1996. Also IRST-Technical Report 9412-09, IRST, Trento, Italy. Commonsense-96, Third Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning, Stanford University, 1996.
C. Ghidini and L. Serafini. Foundation of Federated Databases, I: A Model Theoretic Perspective. Technical Report 9709-02, IRST, Trento, Italy, 1997.
C. Ghidini and L. Serafini. Distributed First Order Logics. In Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Frontiers of Combining Systems (FroCoS’98), Amsterdam, Holland, October, 2–4 1998. To appear.
F. Giunchiglia. Contextual reasoning. Epistemologia, special issue on I Linguaggi e le Macchine, XVI:345–364, 1993. Short version in Proceedings IJCAI’93 Workshop on Using Knowledge in its Context, Chambery, France, 1993, pp. 39–49. Also IRST-Technical Report 9211-20, IRST, Trento, Italy.
F. Giunchiglia and C. Ghidini. Local Models Semantics, or Contextual Reasoning = Locality + Compatibility. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR’98), pages 282–289. Morgan Kaufmann, 1998. Also IRST-Technical Report 9701-07, IRST, Trento, Italy.
F. Giunchiglia and L. Serafini. Multilanguage hierarchical logics (or: how we can do without modal logics). Artificial Intelligence, 65:29–70, 1994. Also IRST-Technical Report 9110-07, IRST, Trento, Italy.
R.V. Guha. Microtheories and contexts in cyc. Technical Report ACT-CYC-129-90, MCC, Austin, Texas, 1990.
A.Y. Levy, A. Rajaraman, and J.J. Ordille. Querying Heterogeneous Information Sources Using Source Descriptions. In Proceedings of the 22nd VLDB Conference, Bombay, India, 1996.
J. Mylopoulos and R. Motschnig-Pitrik. Partitioning Information Bases with Contexts. In Third International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems, Vienna, 1995.
V.S. Subrahmanian. Amalgamating Knowledge Bases. ACM Trans. Database Syst., 19(2):291–331, 1994.
V.S. Subrahmanian, S. Adah, A. Brink, R. Emery, J.J. Lu, A. Rajput, T.J. Rogers, R. Ross, and C. Ward. HERMES: A Heterogeneous Reasoning and Mediator System, 1997. Submitted for Publication. HTML version available at http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/hermes/overview/paper/index.html.
M.W.W. Vermeer and P.M.G. Apers. The Role of Integrity Constraints in Database Interoperation. In Proceedings of the 22nd VLDB Conference, Mumbai(Bombay), India, 1996.
G. Wiederhold. Mediators in the architecture of future information systems. IEEE Computer, 25(3):38–49, 1992.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1999 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Ghidini, C., Serafini, L. (1999). Information Integration for Electronic Commerce. In: Noriega, P., Sierra, C. (eds) Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce. AMET 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 1571. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48835-9_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48835-9_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-65955-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-48835-4
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive