A Declarative Approach to Business Rules in Contracts: Courteous Logic Programs in XML
Published 22 August 2011Open access
Benjamin N. Grosof, Yannis Labrou, Hoi Chan
Citations156
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Abstract
We address why, and especially how, to represent business rules in e-commerce contracts. By contracts, we mean descriptions of goods and services offered or sought, including ancillary agreements detailing terms of a deal. We observe that rules are useful in contracts to represent conditional relationships, e.g., in terms & conditions, service provisions, and surrounding business processes, and we illustrate this point with several examples. We analyze requirements (desiderata) for representing such rules in contracts. The requirements include: declarative semantics so as to enable shared understanding and interoperability; prioritized conflict handling so as to enable modular updating/revision; ease of parsing; integration into WWW-world software engineering; direct executability; and computational tractability. We give a representational approach that consists of two novel aspects. First, we give a new fundamental knowledge representation formalism: a generalized ...
Keywords
Computer Science
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