A Software Implementation of Kimbrough's Disquotation Theory for Representing and Enforcing Electronic Commerce Contracts

Alan S. Abrahams and Jean M. Bacon
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Alan S. Abrahams: University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory
Jean M. Bacon: University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory

Group Decision and Negotiation, 2002, vol. 11, issue 6, No 5, 487-524

Abstract: Abstract Kimbrough's Disquotation Theory, a formal theory about sentences that embed propositional content, expounds the fulfillment and violation conditions for speech acts such as asserting, permitting, and obliging. This paper aims to show how the theory can be profitably applied to the creation of computational environments for monitoring and enforcing electronic commerce contracts using pervasive, mainstream industrial technologies such as Java and relational databases. We examine the notion of an occurrence and provide a structural representation of this abstraction. We show how contractual provisions – obligations, permissions, prohibitions, and powers – can be stored, monitored, and enforced. A query overlap determination mechanism is applied to the problem of monitoring occurrences and analyzing contractual provisions for conflicts. The work presented here demonstrates that, with certain alterations, Kimbrough's theory presents a promising means of storing interrogable and executable specifications for e-commerce workflow applications.

Keywords: continous queries; contracts; Disquotation Theory; electronic commerce; executable specification; occurrences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002
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DOI: 10.1023/A:1020643206972

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