Answering an Inquiry from Heterogeneous Contexts

In this paper we study the semantic consistency maintenance issue between heterogeneous contexts, that is, how an inquiry from an unknown user of an e-marketplace can be received and answered in a semantically consistent way by a firm that is not in the context of the user's e-marketplace. The proposed solution uses XPM to represent semantically consistent business concepts and adopts defeasible logic to reason with XPM document-oriented business rules for inquiring and offering. We motivate the approach with a real-world apartment rental problem, and explain it in architecture of collaborative business process design and automatic service provision. Finally, we report on an implementation specification within a hybrid human-agent framework.