A Multi-Agent Systems Approach to Business Process Interoperability Across Cultural and National Boundaries

摘要

The evolution to a semantic, or knowledgeable Web, in which the wealth of information currently available only to human users, is made available in computer-understandable format, and the emergence of the global economy, which requires the interaction of business and consumer entities with differing cultural and national perspectives, will have a major impact on how the Web is used for e-commerce in the not too distant future. This paper explores the cultural and national issues associated with achieving international business-to-business (IB2B) and international business-to-consumer (IB2C) interoperability in this rapidly evolving environment. It is concluded that knowledge-based systems theory and its extension to a distributed environment, multi-agent systems theory, can make valuable contributions for exploiting the opportunities provided by the semantic Web and the global economy.