title: Contracting in the days of ebusiness
abstract: Putting electronic business on a sound foundation-model theoretically as well as technologically-is a central challenge for research as well as commercial development. This paper concentrates on the discovery and negotiation phase of concluding an agreement based on a contract. We present a methodology for moving seamlessly from a many-to-many relationship in the discovery phase to a one-to-one relationship in the contract negotiation phase. Making the content of contracts persistent is achieved by reconstructing contract templates by means of mereologic (logic of the whole-part relation). Possibly nested sub-structures of the contract template are taken as a basis for negotiation in a dialogical way. For the negotiation itself the contract templates are extended by implications (logical) and sequences (topical)
keyphrases: contracting electronic business many-to-many relationship discovery phase one-to-one relationship contract negotiation phase contract templates mereologic nested sub-structure implications sequences