168 International Journal of Electronic Business Management, Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 168-177 (2013) FRAMEWORK FOR ONTOLOGY-BASED NEGOTIATION TO SUPPORT ENTERPRISE INTEROPERABILITY IN CLOUD-BASED ENVIRONMENTS Adina Cretan 1* , Catarina Ferreira da Silva 2 , Carlos Coutinho 3 , Ricardo Jardim-Goncalves 3 and Parisa Ghodous 2 1 Computer Science Department “Nicolae Titulescu” University of Bucharest Bucharest (031046), Romania 2 Lyon Research Center for Images and Intelligent Information Systems Claude Bernard Lyon 1 University Villeurbanne (69100), France 3 Faculty of Sciences and Technology, UNINOVA, New University of Lisbon Caparica (2829-516), Portugal ABSTRACT In the actual competitive and global business context, the maintenance of interoperation among heterogeneous organisations in a collaborative environment becomes difficult to achieve. Hence, in a dynamic context a change in any of the networked partners affects the others, creating difficulties to sustain the interoperability of the networked environment. This paper proposes negotiation as a key mechanism to achieve and maintain the interoperability between the organisations’ systems and applications, as a supporter for the conflict resolution that typically occurs when the different players discuss and analyse the potential solutions for the interoperation of the integrated business environment. Thus, the presented approach tackles the issue of semantic heterogeneity by introducing ontologies as the main support in the negotiation process. In this respect, this paper proposes an ontology-enriched negotiation framework for sustainable Enterprise Interoperability (EI) and its validation in an industrial scenario. To allow a sustainable, flexible and generic approach towards the infrastructure implementation in global scale, a cloud web-service-based platform is proposed for setting of the framework. Keywords: Enterprise Interoperability, Ontology, Conflict Resolution, Negotiation, Cloud Computing 1. INTRODUCTION 1 In the advent of globalisation, companies are forced to perform a continuous search for new partnerships and solutions. In this networked enterprise environment, this seek often leads to changes that break the interoperability among the already established parties. When this happens, it usually requires significant time and proper negotiations with the involved partners to regain interoperability [21]. Moreover, the increasing exchange of knowledge, resources and expertise among organisations in a networked environment has led to many conflicting situations. * Corresponding author: bratuadina@gmail.com For solving the conflicts, different kinds of research approaches have been applied, from automatic resolution [15] to a mediated resolution approach including negotiation [35]. The negotiation approach plays a key role in solving the conflicts that may occur in a collaborative dynamic environment [6]. To support conflict resolution using negotiation one can rely on ontologies to formalise meaning and thus mitigate semantic heterogeneities [9, 34]. Negotiations are sets of complex actions (e.g., creation of a new proposal, evaluation of proposals by acceptance or rejection), some of which may occur in parallel. In a negotiation, multiple participants exchange and take decisions in multiple phases over a set of multiple attributes of the negotiation objects (e.g., price, size, quality). To be able to formalise and to model the negotiation processes, the metaphor of