Towards Open Electronic Contracting

continuum, allowing for intermediate cases, e.g. trading in an area where industry trading practices are well established and accepted. A central issue for open electronic contracting is in representing and negotiating the ways of doing business among the parties. For instance, is the purchase to be prepaid or post-paid? Will an invoice be sent? Is a receipt required for delivery? In conventional business practice, these ways of doing business are typically specified in fine print on the back of the document. Occasionally, especially where the parties are engaging in a transaction that crosses trade sector or cultural boundaries , the legal terms and conditions expressed in the fine print of their respective documents disagrees or conflicts in some way, and this conflict goes undetec-ted until later, when some further dispute arises. This is known in the legal domain as the " battle of the forms ". Thus, whereas EDI generally focuses on the front side of the document, which contains data about the transaction, our attention will be more to its back side, which contains these terms and conditions. One approach to capture these ways of doing business in computational form is to define standard scenarios, electronic trade procedures that guide the sequence and interpretation of the sending of electronic documents. An ISO/IEC sub-committee (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC30) is working on the definition of standard, EDI based, trade scenarios (ISO, 1996). This initiative is called " Open-EDI ". However, a difficulty of this approach is that these scenarios are fixed in their structure, and do not allow flexible adaptation and customization to meet the needs of a particular situation. A key deliverable of this project is a model expert system for producing trade scenarios customized to a particular situation , yet making use of stored knowledge and experience on their design and legal controls. Thus, the focus of this project is a generalization of the Open-EDI notion of trade scenarios to an artificially intelli-Abstract Abstract Abstract Abstract Abstract A design and pilot implementation of a system, called InterProcs, supporting electronic contracting is presented. A key concept in the design of this system is the notion of electronic trade scenarios (or procedures), which are generic may be downloaded by the trading parties for a particular transaction. These scenarios may be fixed in structure, with simple parameter substitution, or they may also be designed to be customizable, within a certain range of flexibility, depending …