Abstract
An e-contract is a contract modeled, specified, executed, controlled and monitored by a software system. A contract is a legal agreement involving parties, activities, clauses and payments. The goals of an e-contract include precise specification of the activities of the contract, mapping them into deployable workflows, and providing transactional support in their execution. Activities in a contract are generally complex and interdependent. They may be executed by different parties autonomously and in a loosely coupled fashion. They differ from database transactions in many ways: (i) Different successful executions are possible for an activity; (ii) Unsuccessful executions may be compensated or re-executed to get different results; (iii) Whether an execution is successful or not may not be known until after several subsequent activities are executed, and so it may be compensated and/or re-executed at different times relative to the execution of other activities; (iv) Compensation or re-execution of an activity may require compensation or re-execution of several other activities; etc. In this paper, we study the interdependencies between the executions of e-contract activities. This study will be helpful in monitoring behavioral conditions stated in an e-contracts during its execution.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Chiu, D.K.W., Karlapalem, K., Li, Q., Kafeza, E.: Workflow View Based E-Contracts in a Cross-Organizational E-Services Environment. Distributed and Parallel Databases 12(2/3), 193–216 (2002)
Chrysanthis, P.K., Ramamritham, K.: A Formalism for Extended Transaction Models. In: Proc. of the 17th Int. Conf. on Very Large Data Bases, pp. 103–112 (1991)
Grefen, P., Vonk, J.: A Taxonomy of Transactional Workflow Support. International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems 15(1), 87–118 (2006)
Jain, A.K., Aparicio IV, M., Singh, M.P.: Agents for Process Coherence in Virtual Enterprises. Communications of the ACM 42(3), 62–69 (1999)
Krishna, P.R., Karlapalem, K., Dani, A.R.: From Contracts to E-contracts: Modeling and Enactment. Information Technology and Management 6, 363–387 (2005)
Papazoglou, M.P.: Web Services and Business Transactions. World Wide Web: Internet and Web Information Systems 6, 49–91 (2003)
Rouached, M., Perrin, O., Godart, C.: A contract-based approach for monitoring collaborative web services using commitments in the event calculus. In: Ngu, A.H.H., Kitsuregawa, M., Neuhold, E.J., Chung, J.-Y., Sheng, Q.Z. (eds.) WISE 2005. LNCS, vol. 3806, pp. 426–434. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Vidyasankar, K., Radha Krishna, P., Karlapalem, K.: A Multi-Level Model for Activity Commitments in E-contracts. In: Meersman, R., Tari, Z. (eds.) OTM 2007, Part I. LNCS, vol. 4803, pp. 300–317. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Wang, T., Grefen, P., Vonk, J.: Abstract Transaction Construct: Building a Transaction Framework for Contract-driven, Service-oriented Business Processes. In: Dan, A., Lamersdorf, W. (eds.) ICSOC 2006. LNCS, vol. 4294, pp. 434–439. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Xu, L.: A Multi-party Contract Model. ACM SIGecom Exchanges 5(1), 13–23 (2004)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Vidyasankar, K., Krishna, P.R., Karlapalem, K. (2009). Study of Dependencies in Executions of E-Contract Activities. In: Grundspenkis, J., Morzy, T., Vossen, G. (eds) Advances in Databases and Information Systems. ADBIS 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5739. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03973-7_22
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03973-7_22
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-03972-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-03973-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)