A Frame Work for Modeling Electronic Contracts

A contract is an agreement between two or more parties to create business relations or legal obligations between them. A contract will define the set of activities to be performed by parties satisfying a set of terms and conditions (clauses). An e-contract is a contract modeled, specified executed, controlled and monitored by a software system. Typically, a workflow management system is used for e-contract management. E-contracts are complex inter related workflows that have to be specified carefully to satisfy the contract requirements. Most workflow models do not have the capabilities to handle the complexities of these interrelationships. That is, an e-contract does not adhere to activity/task oriented workflow process, thus generating a gap between a conceptual model of e-contract and workflow. Therefore, there is a need for a modeling framework to conceptualize e-contracts and model the complexity of interrelationships. In this paper, we present a framework for conceptually modeling e-contracts (using ER-R data model) and a methodology to translate an e-contract to a workflow that can be executed by a workflow management system.