problematical to find a common vocabulary, a meaning agreement, which will ... Negotiation arises from this context as a process that is appropriate for the con-.
Meaning Negotiation: Applying Negotiation Models to Reach Semantic Consensus in Multidisciplinary Teams Jairo Francisco de Souza1 , Melise Paula1 , Jonice Oliveira1 , and Jano Moreira de Souza1,2 1
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COPPE/UFRJ - Computer Science Department, Graduate School of Engineering, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil jairobd cos.ufrj.br mel cos.ufrj.br jonice cos.ufrj.br DCC-IM/UFRJ - Computer Science Department, Mathematics Institute, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil jano cos.ufrj.br
1 Introduction In our global economic and information readiness, information overload is a fact, not a theory, and there is evidence that most people lack the skills or tools to keep up in the Knowledge Age. Nowadays, all major economic players have decentralized organizational structures, with multiple units acting in parallel and with significant autonomy (Bouzeghoub and et al, 2004). Currently, computational tools and humans have to handle a variety of information sources, with data in several formats, patterns and different quality degrees. Grasping relevant information wherever it may be and exchanging information with all potential partners has become an essential challenge for enterprise survival. The reason that makes semantics so important is that information now has to be sharable and disseminated in a faster way, in a distributed environment, where people or software do not necessarily share a common understanding (Bouzeghoub and et al, 2004). Another issue which emphasizes the importance of semantic and a common consensus is the on growing of multi-disciplinary teams, present in all domains of activities. While multi-disciplinary teams are common in all kind of environments, it is more problematical to find a common vocabulary, a meaning agreement, which will aim in information and knowledge exchange, besides a common understanding of tasks, activities and works. Emergent semantic aims to establish semantic interoperability from a consensus, in relation to interpretations that are common in a particular context. Considering the evolving character of information, whose semantics is enriched by interpretation,
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handling, and use in a particular context, the interoperability is conditioned by the way as the concordance of interpretations on the meaning is established. Negotiation arises from this context as a process that is appropriate for the construction of consensus. However, as interpretations are not necessarily shared at first, semantic interoperability becomes dependent of the frequency, quality, and efficiency with which such negotiations are conducted in order to achieve agreement. In the negotiations that encompass meanings and interpretations, each participating agent can be regarded as an independent decision-maker that carries its own individual perception and judgment regarding the issues under consideration. How in negotiation all the parties involved have to contribute for the agreement not to be reached in an unilateral fashion, it can be seen as inter-dependent decision process. Taking into account that each negotiator possesses different knowledge, experiences and focus, the conciliation of objectives or meanings contributes to the complexity of this kind of negotiation. Thus, there is the need for establishing a management of the process of consensus formation, guaranteeing the incremental and evolving aspects of these agreements. Bearing this assertion in mind, the goal of this work is to present a model of negotiation to obtain the consensus of meanings, that is, semantic consensus, which represents a structured way to deal with the possible conflicts, and with the multiplicity of ideas, making this negotiation a productive process, and a way of creating value for all agents involved by the by the creation of an ontology (which is a common and structure vocabulary). In our approaches to meaning negotiation process, several concepts presented in literature about negotiation are considered and adopted for meaning negotiation context, for example, the BATNA and interest-based approach. In the end of the negotiation, all information which helps to represent the context — as BATNAS, previous domain ontologies, importance and malleability degrees, the attempts at ontology integration and the log of the negotiation table (with the messages IBIS categorization), and the final ontology - are storage for future access.
2 Related Work There are several works dealing with some related issues, such as information integration, schemas and ontology matchmaking, negotiation in agents’ communication and context elicitation. An extended analysis of Emergent Semantic Systems is made in Bouzeghoub and et al (2004) and computational mechanisms can be found in this reference. In Behrens and Kashyap (2001) we found a consensus approach for deriving semantic knowledge on the Web. The significance of information sharing and distribution of cultural knowledge has encouraged some researchers to exploit consensus, measured by inter-subject agreement, as an indicator of knowledge. The method of Consensus Analysis was first presented in several seminal papers (Romney and et al, 1986; Batchelder and K., 1986,?; Batchelder and Romney, 1988). In addition to introducing the formal foundation for Consensus Analysis, the initial papers cited above
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also provided examples of its application to modeling knowledge of general information among US college students, and the classification of illness concepts among urban Guatemalans. Other more recent applications of Consensus Analysis have focused on measuring cultural diversity within organizations (Caulkins and Hyatt, 1999) and different degrees of expertise in organizations and communities of practice creation (Rodrigues and et al, 2005). In the literature, the ontologies have been considered for development of Negotiation Support Systems. In (Jertila and Schoop, 2005), the negotiation roles and issues are represented by ontologies. The ontology specifies the background for negotiation partners. Moreover, the contract defined during negotiation is also represented by elements of the ontology. In this work, our objective is to use already-known techniques of negotiation, usually employed in the business scenario, to facilitate the ontology integration process. Therefore, the ontologies represent the issues that will be negotiated. This fact represents one of the aspects that differs our work of the others that have been found in the literature.
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