Electronic Commerce on the Internet : What Is Still Missing ?

In this paper we investigate those aspects of electronic commerce which can be used to facilitate inter-organisational business dealings. The Internet has substantially promoted different aspects of electronic commerce such as electronic ordering and shopping: electronic malls are increasingly becoming part of the modern information society. However, the pace of adoption of emerging computing and communication technologies for electronic business dealings between enterprises is much slower. We argue that, among other reasons, two major factors for this are: i) an inadequate representation of the semantics of business activities and ii) the lack of a sound legal support for electronic interactions. We propose a general framework for business contracts that addresses both of these issues and investigate how this framework can be used in the context of the Internet.