B2B eContract Handling – A Survey of Projects, Papers and Standards

The rapid development of IT gives rise to changes in many industries and different spheres of life. It simplifies and speeds up processes and data processing. As a result, it changes the processes and the data involved in them. The area of commerce and contracting in particular undergoes similar changes. The new developments aim at speeding up, facilitating and globalizing the process of contracting. This inevitably leads to new contracting processes and changes the standard approach for contracting. This report presents a survey of the research, development, and standardization efforts in the area of business-to-business e-contracting. The report is divided into three parts. The first part presents a multi-dimensional contracting framework. The second part reviews current standardization processes and developments in the e-commerce field. The third part provides summaries and comments on a selected set of papers on e-contracting. Depending on their goals, focus and content, the papers are categorized in accordance with the contract cycle phases described in one of the dimensions of the contracting framework. Where appropriate, the content of the papers is related to the dimensions of the contracting framework. This report further provides an acronym list of the most common abbreviations in e-commerce terminology.