Patent ID: 7149725

Claim:
An apparatus for communicating the contractual commitment of a party, comprising: an agreed commitment model; a commitment encoding engine for encoding commitment data for the party according to the agreed commitment model; a storage facility for storing the commitment data and which is accessible by the commitment encoding engine for retrieving the commitment data; a commitment state store that forms a part of the agreed commitment model and stores data related to a known commitment state of parties to a contract, the commitment state store being accessible by the commitment encoding engine for retrieving the known commitment state data; a decision descriptor store for storing decision descriptors for identifying an external information source, a procedure to be executed by the external information source and parameters required by the procedure; and a messaging module for formatting a message containing information related to a change of state of the agreed commitment model in accordance with an agreed messaging protocol, and for sending, receiving and relaying such messages to the party, wherein the commitment encoding engine comprises: a decision-making engine for deciding whether to change a present commitment state based on a received message, data relating to the present commitment state as stored in the storage facility and data relating to the states that the commitment may undergo as stored in the commitment state store.