Collaborative decision-making framework for supporting multi-mobile decision-makers using ontology

Abstract

We propose a framework to support collaborative decision-making among multi-mobile users. This framework is comprised of an Agent's Case-based Reasoning, Integrated Ontology Generation and a Value Unification Module. The case-based reasoning module used to semantic similarity calculation and is applied to the extraction of the most similar case from each decision maker's case-base. Each the most similar case can be an alternative solution for the new requirement which makes the collaborative decision among the decision-makers. The number of alternative solutions depends on the number of the collaborative decision-makers. Each extracted case is mapped on a personalized personal ontology by projecting each of the cases onto the meta-ontology for deriving an appropriate solution for the new requirement. The personal ontology consists of the classes and/or instances and their relationships that are common in all the personalized personal ontologies. It is named an integrated ontology. As the next step, to find a collaboratively satisfactory solution, we need to determine the degree of unification of classes or instances on the integrated ontology. The weight of unification means the extent to which the classes and/or instances are shared among the decision-makers. The propagation of unification is performed by the value that has maximum weight of unification using the integrated ontology. The unification is executed recursively until it reaches a collaborative decision. To do so, we propose the ontology-based value unification algorithm. However, if we cannot find the solution after the unification is finished, the real-time interactive negotiation algorithm that is newly proposed by us is applied. © 2012 IEEE.