FRAMEWORK FOR ONTOLOGY-BASED NEGOTIATION TO SUPPORT ENTERPRISE INTEROPERABILITY IN CLOUD-BASED...

International Journal of Electronic Business Management

FRAMEWORK FOR ONTOLOGY-BASED NEGOTIATION TO SUPPORT ENTERPRISE INTEROPERABILITY IN

CLOUD-BASED ENVIRONMENTS

Adina Cretan1,*, Catarina Ferreira da Silva2, Carlos Coutinho3, Ricardo Jardim-Goncalves3 and Parisa Ghodous2

1Computer Science Department

“Nicolae Titulescu” University of Bucharest Bucharest (031046), Romania

2Lyon Research Center for Images and Intelligent Information Systems Claude Bernard Lyon 1 University

Villeurbanne (69100), France 3Faculty of Sciences and Technology, UNINOVA

New University of Lisbon Caparica (2829-516), Portugal

ABSTRACT

In the actual competitive and global business context, the maintenance of interoperation among heterogeneous organisations in a collaborative environment becomes difficult to achieve. Hence, in a dynamic context a change in any of the networked partners affects the others, creating difficulties to sustain the interoperability of the networked environment. This paper proposes negotiation as a key mechanism to achieve and maintain the interoperability between the organisations’ systems and applications, as a supporter for the conflict resolution that typically occurs when the different players discuss and analyse the potential solutions for the interoperation of the integrated business environment. Thus, the presented approach tackles the issue of semantic heterogeneity by introducing ontologies as the main support in the negotiation process. In this respect, this paper proposes an ontology-enriched negotiation framework for sustainable Enterprise Interoperability (EI) and its validation in an industrial scenario. To allow a sustainable, flexible and generic approach towards the infrastructure implementation in global scale, a cloud web-service-based platform is proposed for setting of the framework. Keywords: Enterprise Interoperability, Ontology, Conflict Resolution, Negotiation, Cloud Computing

* Corresponding author: [email protected]

1. INTRODUCTION

In the advent of globalisation, companies are forced to perform a continuous search for new partnerships and solutions. In this networked enterprise environment, this seek often leads to changes that break the interoperability among the already established parties. When this happens, it usually requires significant time and proper negotiations with the involved partners to regain interoperability [19].

Moreover, the increasing exchange of knowledge, resources and expertise among organisations in a networked environment has led to many conflicting situations.

For solving the conflicts, different kinds of research approaches have been applied, from automatic resolution [15] to a mediated resolution approach including negotiation [35]. The negotiation approach plays a key role in solving the conflicts that may occur in a collaborative dynamic environment [6]. To support conflict resolution using negotiation one can rely on ontologies to formalise meaning and thus mitigate semantic heterogeneities [9], [36].

Negotiations are sets of complex actions (e.g., creation of a new proposal, evaluation of proposals by acceptance or rejection), some of which may occur in parallel. In a negotiation, multiple participants exchange and take decisions in multiple phases over a set of multiple attributes of the negotiation objects (e.g., price, size, quality). To be able to formalise and


to model the negotiation processes, the metaphor of Interaction Abstract Machines (IAMs) can be adopted [7]. This approach allows the modelling of the evolution of multiple negotiation phases in parallel and including non-deterministic aspects.

In order to solve semantic conflicts during negotiation processes, many research papers propose ontologies as a key solution [24]. Besides, the use of ontology modelling for EI has been proving to be a prominent approach to assure the seamless collaborative enterprise interoperability [33]. In such a distributed setting, ontologies establish a common vocabulary for community members to interlink, combine, and communicate knowledge shaped through practice and interaction, binding the knowledge processes of creating, importing, capturing, retrieving, and using knowledge. Hence, the first steps to be taken in the proposed methodology are the formalisation and the harmonisation processes.

The harmonisation method is presented to support the integration of different kinds of knowledge representation into the proposed architecture. The final goal of this harmonisation is to provide a reference ontology to be used by all enterprise systems and applications involved. The harmonisation method is a stage undertaken before defining the generic ontology, with the purpose of combining the knowledge of different formalisms to improve the representational adequacy and deductive power.

In the last decade, one of the most challenging concepts in achieving interoperability between the organisations’ systems and applications is the development of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) [17]. Web Services have reshaped the existing concepts of solution deployment and provisioning, and paved the way for other important concepts using the same paradigm, like functional discovery and subscription in common repositories, orchestration and composition of services into more complex ones [29], thus creating highly modular and flexible solutions as required. While SOA is meaningful in terms of solutions flexibility, it has limitations with respect to deployment. The advent of distributed computing complements SOA to deal with scalability issues, and the emergent cloud-based solutions are the exponent to this development.

The purpose of this study is to propose a framework that offers mechanisms for ontology-based conflict resolution enriched negotiations in a cloud-based collaborative environment, to support the sustainability of interoperability in business-to-business interactions in networked enterprise environments. Section 2 presents the research questions on cloud-based environments to respond to the described problem. Section 3 analyses the role of negotiation as a conflict

solving approach based on ontologies in the context of cloud-based environments, and section 4 proposes the adoption of cloud-computing to support the sustainability of EI. Section 5 describes the industrial validation case and, finally, section 6 presents the conclusions and final considerations.

2. RESEARCH QUESTIONS ON

CLOUD TO SUPPORT EI SOLUTIONS

To respond to the problems identified in section

1, the following key open research questions and hypotheses for solutions are formulated: • Can conflict resolution using ontology be

addressed by negotiation to improve businesses towards achieving a sustainable enterprise interoperability environment?

• Will businesses benefit from being supported by dedicated services in a cloud-based environment towards interoperability? Under this consideration, a set of hypotheses is

presented: • If business parties detect that changes need to be

performed in order to reach interoperability, negotiation provides an appropriate method to find suitable solutions;

• If businesses are served by a cloud-based enterprise framework, enriched by a reference ontology, a major improvement can be realised towards achieving a sustainable enterprise interoperability environment.

3. CONFLICT SOLVING

NEGOTIATION APPROACH The proposed framework uses a generic

negotiation mechanism and a methodology that models and formalises the negotiation processes [7]. These are supported by a platform [5] that aims to achieve sustainable EI using Model-Driven Architectures (MDA), Model-Driven Interoperability (MDI), SOA and Ontologies. Chen et al. [4] state the definitions and needs of enterprise architectures towards reaching EI, and Nie et al. [27] describe the MDA and MDI concepts and drivers.

Agostinho et al. [1] also propose a framework for applying MDA transformations to data models towards maintaining an interoperable peer-to-peer (P2P) connection between two applications. However, if the changes (due to the establishment of a new partnership or due to internal improvement) have a very high impact, it is likely that model transformations will not be enough to maintain interoperability. Moreover, the idea of a single enterprise in the network changing its model may result in a chain event of model changes on each

A.Cretan et al.: Framework for Ontology-based Negotiation to support Enterprise Interoperability in Cloud-based Environments

enterprise and all its partners and dependents. Enterprise A wanting to be interoperable with Enterprise B proceeds to change its model and leads all it dependences (suppliers, partners, customers) to also change, and so forth for all their dependencies, in a clear pyramid scheme, where on the other hand, a simple change on Enterprise B might prove to be a better solution, or a cooperating solution could be a better approach.

Pataki et al. [30] state three forms of interoperability: • Integrated, where a specific, static and restricted

standard is imposed for all interoperability issues; • Unified, where a common meta-model is used on

all players, which allows each of the players to adapt to the common model with transformations;

• Federated, where no player determines or imposes a model for interoperability.

The idea presented in this paper relates to achieving interoperability not by imposing a new model but by negotiating it with the existing interoperable partners and the new player towards reaching a better solution. This approach leads to improved solutions for interoperability, standards and best-practices that will benefit all players. While the Federated model seems the most promising to achieve this, it seems however to be too complex to be achieved and evolved, so a unified interoperability architecture model is the one that best fits the intended purpose.

According to this approach, the participants to a negotiation may propose offers and each participant may decide in an autonomous manner to stop a negotiation either by accepting or by rejecting the received offer. Indeed, depending on its role in a negotiation, a participant may invite new participants to the negotiation.

The need of companies to collaborate towards increasing their economic efficiency leads to the creation of Virtual Enterprises (VE) or Networks of Enterprises and Virtual Organisations (VO). The proposed framework provides an electronic negotiation support environment that increases the agility to create successful dynamic VOs in the heterogeneous context of the VO breeding environment (VBE). In order to achieve their goal, they adopt several hypotheses to support the negotiation process of dynamic VOs with “smart” characteristics such as: collaboration risk reduction, management of participants’ expectations, traceability, etc.

The heterogeneity of the knowledge involved in the process requires the adoption of ontologies to assist in all collaboration activities. These are required to achieve and sustain the collaborative enterprise environment. Ontologies play also a key role in solving semantic conflict during the negotiation process. The solution of using a common

reference ontology has been approached in many works, such as Torres [32]. The use of a common ontology can become complex when dealing with multiple application fields regarding creation, update and efficient structuration.

In the distributed environments of multi-agent systems, interaction protocols represent a promising approach for coordination in multi-agent systems. In this respect, some papers [26] have proposed a communication protocol which allows agents to select, reference, share, compose, invoke and inspect protocols at runtime. In the proposed decentralised negotiation model, the communication among the agents that conduct several one-to-one conversations in a concurrent manner is made by the common middleware layer.

The final goal of the negotiation process consists in reaching a common agreement among parties in order to support possible collaborations. Oliva et al. [28] propose a framework called SANA (Supporting Artefacts for Negotiation with Argumentation) that incorporates intelligent components able to mediate the agents participating in negotiation to reach an agreement by inferring mutually-acceptable proposals. This solution of using an artificial intelligent mediator can be found in other researches on argumentation-based negotiation, particularly in systems designed for public deliberation. However, this negotiation framework does not incorporate an intelligent mediator for guiding the participating agents in the decision-making process because such solution would limit the autonomy of participants while increasing the power of the mediator. Instead, a general solution is proposed, based on a middleware for sharing proposals in multi-agent negotiations. The main role of the middleware is to support and coordinate negotiations in a distributed environment given the fact that this layer is shared across each partner sites, enabling a decentralised negotiation and preserving the autonomy of the participants.

The negotiation mechanism is divided into three negotiation levels: • The negotiation top level is the Negotiation

Manager, targeted to manage each negotiation party. It handles all business decisions that need to be taken (e.g., creation of a new proposal, acceptance of proposal, rejection of proposal, invitation of another party to take part in the negotiation process) and manages the negotiated interoperability solutions, communicating with the lower levels using web-services [31];

• The negotiation intermediate level is dedicated to the Coordination Services (CS), which assist the negotiations at a global level (negotiations with different participants on different jobs) and at a specific level (negotiation on the same job with different participants) handling all issues regarding


communication at this level (synchronisation between the CS of the several parties that are taking place in the negotiation). The CS shall also handle the on-going transactions and manage the persistence for the status of the negotiation sequences. To improve the interoperability, data is exchanged using a standard protocol, e.g., ISO10303 STEP [18], [21]. This level is also responsible for handling semantic discrepancies during conflict resolution between the negotiating parties via the use of one or more ontologies. It may also include an agent-based architecture [25] to support the complexities of the negotiation operations through the Middleware level [12];

• The negotiation bottom-level is comprised by middleware services that provide support for performing all aspects related with basic infrastructure, and handling the heterogeneity related with multiple negotiation players. It may also include publication of the job requirements and characteristics, in order to allow potential companies interested in participating to “subscribe” to it and be able to enter the negotiation. The middleware level depends on the type and size of the interaction between the players on the negotiation.

Each negotiation is organised in three main steps: initialisation; refinement of the job under negotiation; and closure [37]. The initialisation step allows the definition of what has to be negotiated (Negotiation Object) and how (Negotiation Framework) [8]. In the refinement, participants exchange proposals on the negotiation object to satisfy their constraints [16]. Closure concludes the negotiation.

Different negotiation scenarios that can be found in the lifecycles of the business-to-business negotiations may be modelled. Some of these scenarios can range from simple cases of selection of possible partners and a direct outsourcing of a job, to more complex scenarios of concurrent negotiations with multiple partners to outsource a non-divided job or concurrent negotiations with the possibility to dynamically split the job during the negotiation. 4. CLOUD-BASED FRAMEWORK

FOR SUSTAINABILITY OF EI

To provide supportive environments for collaboration, systems must provide facilities for sharing information, coordinating tasks, and solving conflicts towards a global interoperable collaborative enterprise environment [13]. Such environment can use Web Services (WS) that are suitable to be used with ontologies. Enriched WS with expressive and computer interpretable languages will help capturing the semantics of WS, with ontologies functioning like

metadata schema with a rich descriptive capacity, facilitating the exchange of syntactic and semantic information among people and computers [10]. Thus, integrating ontologies into WS not only enhances the quality and robustness of service discovery and invocation but also paves the way for automated composition and seamless interoperation. Ontology concepts semantically describe services, hence further enabling to find those that are complementary. This semantic enrichment improves the reuse of cloud-based services [24].

WS have the ability to be reused and composed into more complex services, but they must proceed towards distributed computing to handle scalability issues in solutions deployment. Cloud Computing is not actually a new concept or major breakthrough in terms of technology but rather a business concept towards the idea of distributed computing.

Cloud-based solutions may be roughly split into the concepts of on-demand storage and server availability (Infrastructure as a Service or IaaS), on-demand platform integration (Platform as a Service or PaaS) and on-demand processing availability (Software as a Service or SaaS) [3]. This concept also boosted interoperability, with a special favouring for SMEs [22]. Solutions can now be developed in small, inexpensive proof-of-concepts, and if proven correct, rapidly be scaled into large solutions, reducing dramatically time-to-market and allowing companies to enhance agility and flexibility for businesses. Sharma et al. [34] label SaaS as the natural evolution of grid computing and SOA, whilst interoperability using services in a cloud-based environment ensures flexibility on changes.

The proposed framework offers mechanisms to support negotiations in a distributed environment. This includes a set of hierarchically layered and distributed components that implement the rules of the modelled negotiation and also handle the interoperability aspects of the negotiation. Hence, to allow a sustainable, flexible and generic approach towards the implementation of the underlying infrastructure, a cloud web-service-based platform is proposed for this framework.

Considering the current trend on services provisioning and that the complexity of the involved interactions may be from simple to very demanding, the proposed implementation encompasses the subscription of cloud-based services for this matter, allowing the subscription of simple or more demanding processing according to the negotiation environment needs. 4.1 Ontology enriched framework for cloud-based EI

The proposed framework implements the foundations for EI, relying on principles that allow interoperability to become reinforced.


The first step is to model the basic foundations (services and infrastructure) of the framework in a MDA Computation-Independent Model (CIM) which shall define the negotiation concepts (e.g., the IAM states), then transform it into a Platform-Independent Model (PIM) to achieve a higher independence of external factors and to have a clear model of the negotiation partners’ model. This PIM may afterwards be transformed for each negotiation partner into its Platform-Specific Model (PSM) set of cloud-deployed services.

By using Model-Driven Interoperability (MDI) [2], a CIM model shall be created consisting on shared understanding regarding concepts, business models, semantic reasoning, and related aspects of the negotiating parties (e.g., agreed term meanings, negotiation behaviours), which is then transformed into a corresponding PIM where semantic ontologies are defined, and furthermore, to each negotiation partner’s specific PSM databases and services [20]. This way, any interoperability change should be reflected in the corresponding model and thus be able to be assimilated by the other parties [14], as represented on Figure 1.

Regarding the information exchange, behaviour and other aspects of the interoperability itself, the negotiation framework is built using the popular, simple, flexible and robust services in SOA. In order to manage the issues regarding size and scalability, the SOA platform for the framework is implemented on top of a cloud-based system.

Figure 1 describes the architecture of the proposed ontology-based negotiation framework for cloud-based EI. The resulting infrastructure shall be hosted by a SaaS business paradigm, ensuring the handling of all heterogeneity issues (e.g., communications, syntax, session, data) of the basic Middleware level of the framework, on top of which a richer set of services (Coordination Services level) shall be built. These services shall perform complex activities like Transaction Management, the definition and management of the negotiation data model, storage and management of the negotiation data and business states which will implement the model rules.

Actually, data access, its models and data exchange can also be a problem for interoperability. Negotiation parameters, Ontologies and other entities rely on data modelling, specification and consistency and therefore the best way to define the data models and the data exchange is to use a standard. In this case the selected solution is to model the data for databases and data access using the ISO10303 STEP and EXPRESS language specification, enriched by a proper reference ontology. The database infrastructure, as well as the whole model-driven framework infrastructure shall be implemented over cloud, using an IaaS platform.

Figure 1: The architecture of the proposed

Negotiation Framework based on ontologies

5. INDUSTRIAL SCENARIO FOR FRAMEWORK VALIDATION

This Framework is being validated using a case

study from European Space Agency - Concurrent Design Facility (ESA-CDF) [23]. This department performs feasibility studies over the design of space missions, and does so by using the concept of Concurrent Engineering [38], splitting the mission into a set of design disciplines (e.g., Mission Analysis, Power, Structures) each of which is handled by a specific team.

The negotiations among design domains are performed in a set of closed “war-room” sessions where all involved domains and stakeholders are present or represented and where each domain presents its design solutions and the corresponding impact on the mission design. Interoperability in this explosive and highly competitive scenario is assured by the study Team Leader which moderates the discussions and a Systems engineer and related assistants which provide local support to the domain engineers. The seniority of the domain experts which are selected to participate in the study is also a crucial factor to improve interoperability.

The infrastructure includes the definition of a space ontology and the data storage is performed using a database modelled using ISO10303 STEP and Express.

In the ESA-CDF environment the design of each future space mission is split into a set of engineering domains, where each domain engineering team performs its design using different tools (e.g., CATIA, STK, Matlab) and is provided and supported by a network of partners and suppliers [11]. Therefore


interoperability in this case is defined in two levels, the interoperability between each domain and its tools/partners/suppliers towards the target of defining the domain design or vision of the mission, and interoperability among the various domains of a mission-related study, where all the domains negotiate and compete for their interests into setting the values for mission-related parameters (e.g., Spacecraft dry mass, Electrical power, Solar panel dimensions, Launch mass).

Despite these factors, it is quite difficult to maintain clear interoperation, and as studies tend to be more complex, with new concepts, methodologies, formats and terminologies, and data has more dependencies, interoperability will easily break apart, leading to problems in the design integration and to a lot of rework.

Furthermore, the fact that each domain has its own set of dependencies to tools, suppliers and partners makes the coherence of the knowledge among the whole study lifecycle tremendously difficult, as the number of communicating and interoperating channels tends to increase exponentially with the growth of the supply chain.

According to the defined approach, each ESA domain is modelled into MDA and MDI, where the top CIM level defines the view of each domain on the space mission, the concepts and functionalities, and also the negotiation and interoperability needs. These models are progressively transformed into a PIM, and finally into a PSM which defines a specific set of services dedicated to interoperability, (e.g., adapters, translators, proxies and converters). These specific services are then combined with other framework services which concern Negotiation Services, Coordination Services, Ontology Services, and other generic Collaboration Services. These services and their associated structures are assigned to interoperability nodes among sets of entities which share interoperability needs and requirements. This leads to a progressive but rapid consumption of the system resources, and as the interoperability links are no longer needed, these resources are released, thus the system requirements are very demanding while they need to be flexible. Hence, the natural selection of a cloud distributed IaaS to store the framework infrastructure, and of a SaaS platform to host the service sets.

The proposed proof-of-concept scenario connected a set of design domains in a stable interoperable environment, exchanging mission design data. The conflicting situation occurred when the Structures domain (responsible for the definition of the structural architecture of the designed spacecraft) wanted to start working with a new provider tool for CAD drawings, which have a different format than the previously used drawings. So, this is not a problem regarding the business itself

(the design results) but instead it is a problem concerning the interoperability among the different domains involved.

Firstly, the tools for ontology harmonisation provided necessary means to define clearly the new concepts, terms and formats (e.g., planes, connectors, vectors, surfaces), their hierarchy and relationship; so that there was no conflict or misunderstanding with regards to the terms that already existed. This harmonisation led to the update of the reference ontology used to integrate all domains.

The next step was to propose the new tool/format using the negotiation mechanism. The Negotiation Manager of the Structures domain made the proposal, defining the pros and cons of using the new tool instead of the previous one. Here, several heterogeneous arguments may be used, (e.g., economic factors, accuracy, integration, performance, new opportunities, trends and fashions). Therefore, the initiating Negotiation Manager has defined the Negotiation Object described by attributes (e.g., cost; quality; type) and the Negotiation Framework.

Through the agent-based negotiation architecture the proposal was then sent to the Negotiation Managers of the other interoperating parties. Some of the other domains considered that the new format is better for their work and accepted the proposal, others didn’t think the same way and rejected the proposal, and others have submitted a counter-proposal to the requester and thus, the negotiation process began. During this process, a Negotiation Object is manipulated. This data structure represents the different information related to the negotiation under consideration. The communication process among the agents that conduct the negotiation proposals is made by the common middleware bottom-layer of the negotiation architecture.

The negotiation process was conducted until all proposal/counter-proposal cycles were properly finalised. A cycle is finalised when the parties arrive at a common understanding (i.e., in this case a new common format) or when one of the parties ends the negotiation with a clear reject (i.e., in this case a decision to stay with the old format).

The results of the submission of these proposals through the decision-support system were that the new format provided good opportunities for new markets, better performance and accuracy; hence it was worth to advance to the new format. On the other hand, maintaining the interoperability with the refusing parties was important, so it was decided that an adaptor would be built so that the old format would still be available. Considering the number of domains that had refused the new solution, it was found more efficient for the Structures domain to ensure that the information presented in the new format would be available also on the old, and clearly


determined separate interoperating environments, with the new and the old formats.

Hence, despite some time spent on the negotiation, the resulting solution was mature and solid. More, as the negotiations took place before the change was actually performed, and because the discussion among several parties allowed the most important pros and cons to be elicited and considered, the solutions were developed with a reduced integration time and avoided many pitfalls that an unprepared approach would potentiate.

The outcome of the negotiation process allowed the new tool and formats to be used on the current and the next studies, enhancing the quality, performance and accuracy of the design while permitting new opportunities and markets, improving the trust and relationship among the interoperating domains and developing negotiation skills knowledge which allowed future negotiations to spend less time.

6. CONCLUSION

This paper proposes a conflict resolution

through negotiation framework based on ontologies for cloud computing, to support the sustainability of EI in networked environments. This framework allows knowledge, decisions, and responsibilities about negotiations to be exchanged, supported by a reference ontology and using cloud-computing as the paradigm to deploy the services on the network.

Driven by the research questions stated and hypotheses formulated, the conclusions are that currently in a networked enterprise environment the interoperability between partners can be often broken, e.g., due to changes or updates in the enterprises’ systems and applications, or due to the introduction of new ones in the network. To re-establish the interoperability, negotiation between the parties should be considered. However, the negotiation process is knowledge-based, and the adoption of a reference ontology is proposed to support the conciliation during negotiation for the establishment of interoperability.

The adoption of cloud-computing allows this procedure to be based on seamless services, accessible by everyone in any part of the network. The use of the proposed ontology-enriched platform results in a seamless, sustainable interoperability, based on a deep knowledge among each negotiating party. Hence, the adoption of cloud computing makes the functionalities of the framework available in services that can be used in a universal way by the parties involved in the collaborative environment. This results in a more stable interaction which is less prone to break apart and which favours its maintenance across time. The framework provides the ability to reach and interoperate with more parties

also leading to more business opportunities and to stronger and healthier interactions.

This research plans to improve the functionalities of the proposed framework in the near future, adding a renegotiation mechanism based on the experience learned from the past negotiations, intending to accelerate the actual negotiation process and achieve more intelligent, accurate and faster results towards the sustainability of networked EI environments.

7. ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The authors wish to acknowledge the support

of the European Commission through the funding of the UNITE, MSEE, IMAGINE and ENSEMBLE FP7 projects, and the European Space Agency - Concurrent Design Facility (ESA-CDF) for their support and contribution in the development of the presented business case.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Adina Cretan is an academic with wide interest in the research area covering Multi-Agent Systems, Distributed Systems, Collaborative modelling, Ontologies, Interoperability. She holds a PhD in Economic Informatics, awarded by the Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest, Romania, and completed Post-Doctoral research in Service Oriented Computing field at LIRIS Research Center University

Lyon I, France. She also holds an MBA from the joint program of the Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest, Romania and CNAM Paris, France. At present, Adina teaches at “Nicolae Titulescu” University of Bucharest, as Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department. Catarina Ferreira da Silva is currently Associate Professor in computer science department of the Institute of Technology of the University of Lyon I. She is also member of LIRIS UMR 5205 CNRS (Laboratory of Computer Graphics, Images and Information Systems). Between 2009 and 2012 she was researcher at the Centre for Informatics and Systems of the University of Coimbra (CISUC), Portugal, within the Information Systems Group. From 2006 to 2008, she was teacher at the computer science department of the University of Lyon I and researcher at the LIRIS. She obtained a Ph.D. in computer science (2007) from the University of Lyon I. Her main research interests are Semantic Interoperability of Information Systems, Ontologies, Services Science and Cloud Computing. Carlos Coutinho is a Ph.D. candidate with more than 15 years of experience in the enterprise IT area working in several fields from ICT, Service development, Public Administration and the Aerospace industry. Currently he is a full-time researcher in the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of the New University of Lisbon (FCT-UNL), Portugal, with research interests in Information Systems and Computer Science in the areas of Enterprise Interoperability, Adaptable Platforms and Systems, Service-Oriented Architectures, Model-Driven Computing and Development, Negotiation systems, Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems. Ricardo Jardim-Goncalves holds a PhD degree and received his habilitation (“Agregação”) in Industrial Information Systems by the New University of Lisbon (UNL). He is an Associate Professor at the New University of Lisbon, Faculty of Sciences and Technology, and a Senior Researcher at UNINOVA – Instituto de Desenvolvimento de Novas Tecnologia. He has graduated in Computer Science, with MSc in Operational Research and Systems Engineering. His research activities have been focused on Interoperability of Complex Systems. He has been researching in European Commission funded projects during the last 20 years, with more than 100 papers published in conferences, journals and books. He directs GRIS (GRupo para a investigação em Interoperabilidade de Sistemas; Group for Research in Interoperability of Systems) at UNINOVA (Instituto para o Desenvolvimento de Novas


Tecnologias), CTS (Centro para as Tecnologias e Sistemas). He is project leader in ISO TC184/SC4. Parisa Ghodous is currently full Professor in computer science department of University of Lyon I. She is member of LIRIS UMR 5205 (Laboratory of Computer Graphics, Images and Information Systems). Her research expertise is in the following areas: Interoperability, Semantic Web, Web services, Collaborative modeling, Product data exchange and modeling and Cloud Computing. She is in editorial boards of CERA, ICAE and IJAM journals and in the committees of many relevant international associations such as concurrent engineering, ISPE and Interoperability.

FRAMEWORK FOR ONTOLOGY-BASED NEGOTIATION TO SUPPORT ENTERPRISE INTEROPERABILITY IN CLOUD-BASED...

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