Ontological approach for e-services

Information sharing is crucial to the success of business applications in a collaborative environment. This paper presents a novel approach for information sharing which is suitable for distributed computing. Agent technologies are applied to cope with service agents' on and off and to provide semantic support for implementation of complex e-business applications that may span diverse organisations. A finite state machine (FSM), which is ideally suited for modelling business processes, is investigated to facilitate process automation. Our approach aims to support dynamic information sharing and reuse in e-business applications. A case study illustrates our ontological approach in employing FSM agents in an inter-organisational environment. A demonstration integrating the JADE platform and frame-based ontologies is also presented.