Requirements on a B2B e-contract language

Electronic contracts are the instrument to govern electronic trading relationships between business parties. A number of efforts exist in both the academic and industrial worlds to define an e-contract specification language. However, these efforts lack either universality or completeness. The main reasons for this are the complexity and diversity of business contracts. For the definition of a common, complete e-contract specification language, the identification of requirements on an e-contract language is an underlying prerequisite. In this paper, we present the requirements on an e-contract specification language. The identified requirements are based on the investigation of traditional business contracts from different business domains (business pull aspects), the technology aspects of e-contracts (technology push aspects), and the existing research efforts on this topic (research aspects). The results presented in this paper allow definition of e-contract specification languages that satisfy the requirements imposed by both business and technology.