Using similarity measures for an efficient business information-exchange

Several problems are involved in the virtual enterprise (VE) formation process. One of the most important problems is the lack of understanding that may arise during agents' interaction, due to both the structural and semantic concepts representation heterogeneity. In the VE life cycle identification of needs, for example, it is necessary to describe the needed product or service in a way that it can be understood by all the participants. The easier way of solving this problem is to use either a common ontology or a shared one which may be understood by all the enterprise delegate agents participating in the process. However, each agent may have one of the existing different ontologies and a shared ontology will not be universal. Thus, the enterprises will not waste time converting all the content of their ontology if the new one is not considered a universal one. Due to these facts we have created an ontology-based service agent which finds correspondence (similarity) between the concepts (products) of two ontologies through their respective concept's names, characteristics, relations and concept's descriptions.