A Review and Comparison of Service E-Contract Architecture Metamodels

An adaptive service e-contract is an electronic agreement which is required to enable adaptive or agile service sourcing and provisioning. There are a number of e-contract metamodels that can be used to create a context speci c adaptive service e-contract. The challenge is which one to choose and adopt for adaptive services. This paper presents a review and comparison of well-known e-contract metamodels using the architecture theory. The architecture theory allows the analysis of the e-contract metamodels using a threedimension analytical lens: structure, behavior and technology. The results of this paper highlight the metamodels structural, behavioral and technological di erences and similarities. This paper will help researchers and practitioners to observe whether the existing e-contract metamodels are appropriate to the adaptive services or if there is a need to merge and integrate the concepts of these metamodels to propose a new unifying adaptive service e-contract metamodel. This paper is limited to the number of compared metamodels.