Lifecycle for Management of E-contracts Based on Web Service

Electronic contracts (e-contracts) create obligations, permissions, and prohibitions for the parties in the Internet. However, the support to interpret and enforce the clauses related to contracts is limited in current implementations. Besides, e-contracts must follow the continuous change of business rules. The service provider must make available the services that enable the parties to satisfy obligations and respect permissions and prohibitions during the lifecycle of the contract. This task requires a considerable effort from the providers. We propose a lifecycle aid the management econtracts. The lifecycle aims to allow automation of configuration of Web Service in order to facilitate the implementation work of providers. The six phases of lifecycle can be employed in Business-to-business (B2B) and Business-to-Consumer (B2C) contracts. To validate the approach, we employed the lifecycle in an implementation that uses the REST style to build, get and set the e-contract.