Towards Open Electronic Contracting

Abstract

A design and pilot implementation of a system, called InterProcs, supporting electronic contracting is presented. A key concept in the design of this system is the notion of electronic trade scenarios (or procedures), which are generic may be downloaded by the trading parties for a particular transaction. These scenarios may be fixed in structure, with simple parameter substitution, or they may also be designed to be customizable, within a certain range of flexibility, depending on the type of transaction. The system also includes multi-lingual text generation, in support of international trade transactions.

Keywords: electronic contracting, trade procedures, formal language contracting