A Modeling Perspective on Web Service Contracting

Service-oriented computing as a concept for providing interoperability and flexibility within heterogeneous environments has gained much attention within last years. Dynamically integrating external Web services into enterprise applications requires automatic contracting between service requestors and providers. Admittedly, pure automatic contracting is currently not feasible due to the complexity of real world contracts. As an interim solution we aim towards semi-automatic contracting where some clauses are negotiated automatically within the scope of a framework contract. In this paper, we elaborate on the content of Web service contracts from a legal perspective before discussing an ontology-based representation of negotiable contract clauses.