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

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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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building, 15 JJ Thomson Avenue, Cambridge, CB3 0FD, UK

    Alan S. Abrahams & Jean M. Bacon

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  1. Alan S. Abrahams
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  2. Jean M. Bacon
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Abrahams, A.S., Bacon, J.M. A Software Implementation of Kimbrough's Disquotation Theory for Representing and Enforcing Electronic Commerce Contracts. Group Decision and Negotiation 11, 487–524 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1020643206972

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