Extending the SweetDeal Approach for e-Procurement Using SweetRules and RuleML

Abstract

We show the first detailed realistic e-business application scenario that uses and exploits capabilities of the SweetRules V2.1 toolset for e-contracting using the SweetDeal approach. SweetRules is a uniquely powerful integrated set of tools for semantic web rules and ontologies. SweetDeal is a rule-based approach to representation of business contracts that enables software agents to create, evaluate, negotiate and execute contacts with substantial automation and modularity. The scenario that we implement is of electronic procurement of computers, with request-response iterated B2B supply-chain management communications using RuleML as content of the contracting discovery/negotiation messages. In particular, the capabilities newly exploited include: SweetJess or SweetXSB to do inferencing in addition to the option of SweetCR inferencing, SweetOnto to incorporate/merge-in OWL-DLP ontologies, and effectors to launch real-world actions. We identify desirable additional aspects of query and message management to incorporate into RuleML and give the design of experimental extensions to the RuleML schema/model, motivated by those, that include specifically: fact queries and answers to them. We present first scenario of using SCLP RuleML for rebates and financing options, in particular exploiting the courteous prioritized conflict handling feature. We give a new SweetDeal architecture for the business messaging aspect of contracting, in particular exploiting the situated feature to exchange rulesets, that obviates the need to write new (non-rule-based) agents as in the previous SweetDeal V1 prototype. We finally analyze how the above techniques, and SweetDeal, RuleML and SweetRules overall, can combine powerfully with other e-business technologies such as RosettaNet and ebXML.