Using Cooperative Agent Negotiation for Ontology Mapping C´assiaTrojahn a M´arciaMoraes b Paulo Quaresma a Renata Vieira c a Departamento de Inform´atica, Universidade de ´ Evora, Portugal b Faculdade de Inform´atica, Pontif´ ıcia Universidade Cat´olica do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil c P´ os-Gradua¸ c˜ ao em Computa¸c˜ ao Aplicada, Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos, Brazil Abstract Well-known approaches for the ontology mapping can be grouped into lexical, semantic, and structural ones. We assume that the approaches are complementary to each other and their combination produces better results than the individual ones. However, they produce different and probably conflicting results, which must be shared, compared, chosen and agreed. This paper proposes a cooperative negotiation model, where agents apply individual mapping algorithms and negotiate on a final mapping result. We compare our model with three state of the art matching systems. The results, although preliminary, are promising especially for what concerns precision and recall. 1 Introduction Ontology mapping is the process of linking corresponding terms from different ontologies. The mapping result can be used for ontology merging, agent communication, query answering, or for navigation on the Semantic Web. Well-known approaches to the problem can be grouped into lexical, semantic, and structural ones, as terms may be mapped by a measure of lexical similarity, or they can be evaluated se- mantically, usually on the basis of semantic oriented linguistic resources, or considering the term positions in the ontology hierarchy. However even in the same group of approaches, different ap- proaches are abundant in the literature. Examples of lexical approaches are [24][19] while semantic and structural ones can be seen in [11][21]. Individual approaches are not satisfactory to the problem. We assume that these approaches are complementary to each other and their combination produces better results than the individual ones. However, they produce different and probably conflicting results, which must be shared, compared, chosen and agreed. We propose a cooperative negotiation model, where agents apply individual mapping algorithms and negotiate on a final mapping result. We compared our model with three state of the art schema-based matching systems, namely Cupid [14], COMA [6], and S- Match [9]. The results, although preliminary, are promising, especially for what concerns precision and recall. This paper is structured as follows. The next section comments on cooperative negotiation. Section 3 introduces the ontology mapping approaches. Section 4 presents our cooperative nego- tiation model. Section 5 presents the experiments using our model. Section 6 comments relevant related works. Finally, Section 7 presents the final remarks and the future works. 2 Cooperative Negotiation Negotiation is a process by which two or more parties make a joint decision [27]. It is a key form of interaction that enables groups of agents to arrive to mutual agreement regarding some belief, goal or plan [2]. Hence the basic idea behind negotiation is reaching a consensus [10]. Negotiation usually proceeds in a series of rounds, with every agent making a proposal at each round [26]. The process can be described as follows, based on [16]. One agent generates a proposal