Expert finding and query answering for Collaborative Inter-Organizational system by using Rule Responder

Abstract

Collaborative inter-organizational system (C-IOS) is defined as information technology-based systems that engage multiple business partners for achieving some common value-added goals. In the past, many papers from the literature addressed a large number of techniques on collaborative agents. The techniques range from basic information exchange to sophisticated negotiation. Specifically, for C-IOS's two important tasks namely Experts Finding (EF) and Query Answering (QA) are required in collaboration. These two specific tasks facilitate supply-chain mediation and may be subsequent procurement negotiation. EF concerns about finding or match-making the right personnel in an organization as a committee member for fulfilling a part of the job. QA screens initially whether the resources and commitments are potentially available. The two tasks supposedly would have executed prior to any further collaboration, and the communication is cross organizations. This paper contributes a design of C-IOS that supports EF and QA for inter-organizational collaboration. The underlying technical framework is by Rule Responder which is a powerful tool for creating virtual organizations as multi-agent systems that support collaborative teams on the Semantic Web. A use case of hosting an academic conference among different organizations is illustrated with our proposed concepts in this paper.