The large number of contracts in force in an enterprise becomes an important factor in making business decisions. Moreover, an enterprise must be able to respond to events that might affect existing contractual relationships. However, most enterprises do not have the capability to easily manage the life cycle of enterprise contracts. Current solutions bundled into products are typically only efficiently used when applied to new business contracts but not to legacy ones, which often constitute the majority of the contracts in an enterprise. Critical information in such contracts remains buried in the text of these documents, requiring a tedious and costly manual inspection task to extract the information required for their proper management. In this paper we present an approach, called FACTS, to automatically elicit legacy contracts information that enables the effective and efficient management of their lifecycle. The approach is based in the use of two object models in conjunction with information extraction techniques. Once relevant information in a contract is identified, it can either be automatically tagged with XML or simply extracted into a contract facts database. In both cases, relevant contract information becomes readily available through predefined or ad-hoc queries.
{"title":"FACTS: an approach to unearth legacy contracts","authors":"M. Castellanos, U. Dayal","doi":"10.1109/WEC.2004.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/WEC.2004.8","url":null,"abstract":"The large number of contracts in force in an enterprise becomes an important factor in making business decisions. Moreover, an enterprise must be able to respond to events that might affect existing contractual relationships. However, most enterprises do not have the capability to easily manage the life cycle of enterprise contracts. Current solutions bundled into products are typically only efficiently used when applied to new business contracts but not to legacy ones, which often constitute the majority of the contracts in an enterprise. Critical information in such contracts remains buried in the text of these documents, requiring a tedious and costly manual inspection task to extract the information required for their proper management. In this paper we present an approach, called FACTS, to automatically elicit legacy contracts information that enables the effective and efficient management of their lifecycle. The approach is based in the use of two object models in conjunction with information extraction techniques. Once relevant information in a contract is identified, it can either be automatically tagged with XML or simply extracted into a contract facts database. In both cases, relevant contract information becomes readily available through predefined or ad-hoc queries.","PeriodicalId":426694,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings. First IEEE International Workshop on Electronic Contracting, 2004.","volume":"65 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121986133","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In a virtual enterprise context, business process interoperability and cooperative process enactment are important in order to achieve a common objective despite the distribution in space, time and organizations. A contract is a facility used to deploy cross-organizational processes, to monitor and to enforce the composition and the enactment of these processes both inside and outside the organization's boundaries. This paper presents a contract model for describing clauses that address business interactions, for deploying cross-organizational activities (called synchronization points) and for enforcing and controlling policies. The contract is an XML document used to describe how process Web services cooperates and how synchronization points enforce contract clauses.
{"title":"An approach to implement contracts as trusted intermediaries","authors":"O. Perrin, C. Godart","doi":"10.1109/WEC.2004.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/WEC.2004.2","url":null,"abstract":"In a virtual enterprise context, business process interoperability and cooperative process enactment are important in order to achieve a common objective despite the distribution in space, time and organizations. A contract is a facility used to deploy cross-organizational processes, to monitor and to enforce the composition and the enactment of these processes both inside and outside the organization's boundaries. This paper presents a contract model for describing clauses that address business interactions, for deploying cross-organizational activities (called synchronization points) and for enforcing and controlling policies. The contract is an XML document used to describe how process Web services cooperates and how synchronization points enforce contract clauses.","PeriodicalId":426694,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings. First IEEE International Workshop on Electronic Contracting, 2004.","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117096009","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
An important motivation for moving business processes to the Web is to reduce the cost associated with having them done by people. One such process is negotiation. Automating negotiations requires that we be able to agree on what we're negotiating for, quantify the value of different possible outcomes, and have a set of rules that specify how the negotiation proceeds. This paper presents a unified approach to address these issues. Contributions include a form of presenting offers that makes it easier to search a large space of potential deals and a negotiation protocol that is guaranteed to terminate in a finite number of steps.
{"title":"Rules of engagement for automated negotiation","authors":"A. Karp","doi":"10.1109/WEC.2004.18","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/WEC.2004.18","url":null,"abstract":"An important motivation for moving business processes to the Web is to reduce the cost associated with having them done by people. One such process is negotiation. Automating negotiations requires that we be able to agree on what we're negotiating for, quantify the value of different possible outcomes, and have a set of rules that specify how the negotiation proceeds. This paper presents a unified approach to address these issues. Contributions include a form of presenting offers that makes it easier to search a large space of potential deals and a negotiation protocol that is guaranteed to terminate in a finite number of steps.","PeriodicalId":426694,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings. First IEEE International Workshop on Electronic Contracting, 2004.","volume":"66 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116235015","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Z. Milosevic, S. Gibson, P. Linington, J. Cole, S. Kulkarni
In this paper we present a solution to the problem of designing and implementing a contract monitoring facility as part of a larger cross-organisational contract management architecture. We first identify key technical requirements for such a facility and then present our contract language and architecture that address key aspects of the requirements. The language is based on a precise model for the expression of behaviour and policies in the extended enterprise and it can be used to build models for a particular enterprise contract environment. These models can be executed by a contract engine that supports the contract management life cycle at both the contract establishment and contract execution phases.
{"title":"On design and implementation of a contract monitoring facility","authors":"Z. Milosevic, S. Gibson, P. Linington, J. Cole, S. Kulkarni","doi":"10.1109/WEC.2004.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/WEC.2004.13","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper we present a solution to the problem of designing and implementing a contract monitoring facility as part of a larger cross-organisational contract management architecture. We first identify key technical requirements for such a facility and then present our contract language and architecture that address key aspects of the requirements. The language is based on a precise model for the expression of behaviour and policies in the extended enterprise and it can be used to build models for a particular enterprise contract environment. These models can be executed by a contract engine that supports the contract management life cycle at both the contract establishment and contract execution phases.","PeriodicalId":426694,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings. First IEEE International Workshop on Electronic Contracting, 2004.","volume":"123 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134631278","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Describing digital value for payment systems is not a trivial task. Simplistic methods of using numbers or country codes to describe currencies, and ticker tape symbols to issue bonds, shares, and other financial instruments soon run into shortcomings in their ability to handle dynamic and divergent demands. The seemingly arbitrary variations in the meanings of different instruments are best captured as contracts between issuers and holders. Thus, the digital issuance of instruments can be viewed as the issuance of contracts. This paper proposes that the contract is the issue. A document form is described that encompasses the inherent contractual nature of the financial instrument yet copes with the requirements of being an integral part of a payment system.
{"title":"The Ricardian contract","authors":"I. Grigg","doi":"10.1109/WEC.2004.19","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/WEC.2004.19","url":null,"abstract":"Describing digital value for payment systems is not a trivial task. Simplistic methods of using numbers or country codes to describe currencies, and ticker tape symbols to issue bonds, shares, and other financial instruments soon run into shortcomings in their ability to handle dynamic and divergent demands. The seemingly arbitrary variations in the meanings of different instruments are best captured as contracts between issuers and holders. Thus, the digital issuance of instruments can be viewed as the issuance of contracts. This paper proposes that the contract is the issue. A document form is described that encompasses the inherent contractual nature of the financial instrument yet copes with the requirements of being an integral part of a payment system.","PeriodicalId":426694,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings. First IEEE International Workshop on Electronic Contracting, 2004.","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116506698","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2004-07-06DOI: 10.1109/TSMCC.2005.860573
Cuihong Li, J. Giampapa, K. Sycara
Negotiation is an important phase of e-contracting. E-contracting requires a proper negotiation model to effectively support negotiation decisions or automate the negotiation process. When an entity negotiates with a potential contractor, there may be some alternatives that exist simultaneously with the potential contractor, and/or some may present themselves in the future. We present a model for bilateral contract negotiations that considers the uncertain and dynamic outside options. Outside options affect the negotiation strategies via their impact on the reservation price. The model is composed of three modules, single-threaded negotiations, synchronized multi-threaded negotiations, and dynamic multi-threaded negotiations. These three models embody increased sophistication and complexity. The single-threaded negotiation model provides negotiation strategies without specifically considering outside options. The model of synchronized multi-threaded negotiations builds on the single-threaded negotiation model and considers the presence of concurrently existing outside options. The model of dynamic multi-threaded negotiations expands the synchronized multi-threaded model by considering the uncertain outside options that may come dynamically in the future. Experimental analysis is provided to characterize the impact of outside options on the negotiation strategy and performances.
{"title":"Bilateral negotiation decisions with uncertain dynamic outside options","authors":"Cuihong Li, J. Giampapa, K. Sycara","doi":"10.1109/TSMCC.2005.860573","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TSMCC.2005.860573","url":null,"abstract":"Negotiation is an important phase of e-contracting. E-contracting requires a proper negotiation model to effectively support negotiation decisions or automate the negotiation process. When an entity negotiates with a potential contractor, there may be some alternatives that exist simultaneously with the potential contractor, and/or some may present themselves in the future. We present a model for bilateral contract negotiations that considers the uncertain and dynamic outside options. Outside options affect the negotiation strategies via their impact on the reservation price. The model is composed of three modules, single-threaded negotiations, synchronized multi-threaded negotiations, and dynamic multi-threaded negotiations. These three models embody increased sophistication and complexity. The single-threaded negotiation model provides negotiation strategies without specifically considering outside options. The model of synchronized multi-threaded negotiations builds on the single-threaded negotiation model and considers the presence of concurrently existing outside options. The model of dynamic multi-threaded negotiations expands the synchronized multi-threaded model by considering the uncertain outside options that may come dynamically in the future. Experimental analysis is provided to characterize the impact of outside options on the negotiation strategy and performances.","PeriodicalId":426694,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings. First IEEE International Workshop on Electronic Contracting, 2004.","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133817128","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The standardizations of XML language for e-business like ebXML and BPEL4WS are being carried out and message specifications for connecting workflows of several companies are also being examined. However, not all of the rules in contract can be incorporated into workflows. When an exception which cannot be resolved by workflows occurs, it is important to support settlement of the execution by following contracts. The process of settlement should include human negotiations on interpretations of the contracts, analysis of situations, and proposal of solutions. In this paper, we report a prototype system which supports the entire process of settling exceptions, based on the workflow-contract-solution model. We report the system architecture and modeling examples, and utilization of the system by a realistic trade scenario. The system demonstrated capabilities of clearly modeling contracts and situations, and usefulness of searching histories.
{"title":"An integrated system for supporting problem solution in e-contract execution","authors":"M. Iwaihara, Haiying Jiang, Y. Kambayashi","doi":"10.1109/WEC.2004.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/WEC.2004.3","url":null,"abstract":"The standardizations of XML language for e-business like ebXML and BPEL4WS are being carried out and message specifications for connecting workflows of several companies are also being examined. However, not all of the rules in contract can be incorporated into workflows. When an exception which cannot be resolved by workflows occurs, it is important to support settlement of the execution by following contracts. The process of settlement should include human negotiations on interpretations of the contracts, analysis of situations, and proposal of solutions. In this paper, we report a prototype system which supports the entire process of settling exceptions, based on the workflow-contract-solution model. We report the system architecture and modeling examples, and utilization of the system by a realistic trade scenario. The system demonstrated capabilities of clearly modeling contracts and situations, and usefulness of searching histories.","PeriodicalId":426694,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings. First IEEE International Workshop on Electronic Contracting, 2004.","volume":"315 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132097338","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this paper, we present a model for a licensing scheme that allows the expression, negotiation and management of digital rights, in a federated object-sharing environment. We first discuss motivations and issues around digital rights management (DRM), we then describe the DRM implementation for the celebrate project, and propose an extension to the celebrate model in order to take into account licenses as opposed to individual rights.
{"title":"A digital licensing model for the exchange of learning objects in a federated environment","authors":"J. Simon, Jean-Noel Colin","doi":"10.1109/WEC.2004.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/WEC.2004.1","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, we present a model for a licensing scheme that allows the expression, negotiation and management of digital rights, in a federated object-sharing environment. We first discuss motivations and issues around digital rights management (DRM), we then describe the DRM implementation for the celebrate project, and propose an extension to the celebrate model in order to take into account licenses as opposed to individual rights.","PeriodicalId":426694,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings. First IEEE International Workshop on Electronic Contracting, 2004.","volume":"253 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132155568","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Andrew D. H. Farrell, Marek Sergot, M. Sallé, Claudio Bartolini, David Trastour, Athena Christodoulou
Utility computing (UC) is concerned with the provisioning of computational resources (compute-power, storage, network bandwidth), on a per-need basis, to corporate businesses. Service-level agreements (SLAs) - contracts between a provider and a customer - are a sine qua non in the deployment of UC. A crucial stage in the life-cycle of contracts (such as SLAs) is their automated performance monitoring while active; a significant aspect of which concerns the tracking of contract state. In this work, we define an ontology to capture aspects of SLAs that are pertinent to the tracking of state for performance monitoring, and generalise these aspects so that the ontology may be applicable to other contract domains. The ontology is formalised as an XML-based language, called CTXML (contract tracking XML). The semantics for CTXML are presented in terms of a computational model based on the event calculus.
{"title":"Performance monitoring of service-level agreements for utility computing using the event calculus","authors":"Andrew D. H. Farrell, Marek Sergot, M. Sallé, Claudio Bartolini, David Trastour, Athena Christodoulou","doi":"10.1109/WEC.2004.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/WEC.2004.15","url":null,"abstract":"Utility computing (UC) is concerned with the provisioning of computational resources (compute-power, storage, network bandwidth), on a per-need basis, to corporate businesses. Service-level agreements (SLAs) - contracts between a provider and a customer - are a sine qua non in the deployment of UC. A crucial stage in the life-cycle of contracts (such as SLAs) is their automated performance monitoring while active; a significant aspect of which concerns the tracking of contract state. In this work, we define an ontology to capture aspects of SLAs that are pertinent to the tracking of state for performance monitoring, and generalise these aspects so that the ontology may be applicable to other contract domains. The ontology is formalised as an XML-based language, called CTXML (contract tracking XML). The semantics for CTXML are presented in terms of a computational model based on the event calculus.","PeriodicalId":426694,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings. First IEEE International Workshop on Electronic Contracting, 2004.","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129526995","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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