A Contract Agreement Policy-Based Workflow Methodology for Agents Interacting in the Semantic Web

The Semantic Web aims at automating Web content understanding and user request satisfaction. Intelligent agents assist towards this by performing complex actions on behalf of their users into real-life applications, such as e-Contracts, which make transactions simple by modeling the processes involved. This paper, presents a policy-based workflow methodology for efficient contract agreement among agents interacting in the Semantic Web. In addition, we present the integration of this methodology into a multi-agent knowledgebased framework, providing flexibility, reusability and interoperability of behavior between agents. The main advantage of our approach is that it provides a safe, generic, and reusable framework for modeling and monitoring e-Contract agreements, which could be used for different types of on-line transactions among agents. Furthermore, our framework is based on Semantic Web and FIPA standards, to maximize interoperability and reusability. Finally, an eCommerce contract negotiation scenario is presented that illustrates the usabili-