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This paper is an integrative essay on the activities and intellectual concerns of the FMEC community. The paper frames these concerns around three ‘non-standard’ formalisms (logic, graphs, and procedures), three themes or general problems (representation, inference, and learning), and seven more specific topics (electronic data interchange, electronic contracting, speech acts, special logics, system and process modelling, strategy formation, and computational discovery). In addition, the paper introduces each of the chapters in this book and places them within the general FMEC framework. An appendix to the paper records the bibliographic history of the FMEC community.

We show how Kimbrough’s Disquotation Theory, a formal theory about sentences that embed propositional content, 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. Detailed examples illustrate how a query coverage-determination mechanism can be used to check inter-organizational contractual provisions against internal policies and external legislation for dynamic conflicts. The work presented here demonstrates that an extended version of Kimbrough’s theory presents a novel and promising means of storing interrogable and executable specifications for e-commerce workflow applications.

Communicative workflow modelling is key to describing, analyzing, and designing business procsses in virtual collaborative networks, such as present in e-commerce. To make workflow models meaningful and acceptable to all partners, their legitimacy must be ensured. To this purpose, the underlying norms must be made explicit and used to check model acceptability. A key class of communicative workflow models are captured by our extended workflow loop. Using this loop as the basic unit of analysis, we introduce the concept of workflow loop norms, grounded in, amongst others, internal control theory. Workflow loop schemas are used to represent workflow situations, allowing for actual or proposed situations to be matched with the norms. Using these constructs, we outline our legitimacy checking process for workflow designs, and illustrate it with a case.

The formal language CANDID is presented as a knowledge representation formalism for artificially intelligent decision support systems. The language is specifically oriented to representation of concepts in finance, commerce and administration. Later parts of the paper demonstrate the application of CANDID to explication of corporate entities and contractual objects, as well as to various concepts in elementary finance.

The formal language CANDID is presented as a knowledge representation formalism for artificially intelligent decision support systems. The language is specifically oriented to representation of concepts in finance, commerce and administration. Later parts of the paper demonstrate the application of CANDID to explication of corporate entities and contractual objects, as well as to various concepts in elementary finance.

The formal language CANDID is presented as a knowledge representation formalism for artificially intelligent decision support systems. The language is specifically oriented to representation of concepts in finance, commerce and administration. Later parts of the paper demonstrate the application of CANDID to explication of corporate entities and contractual objects, as well as to various concepts in elementary finance.

The feasibility of open, flexible electronic commerce relies heavily on the effective management of documentary procedures, i.e., the sequence by which (structured) business documents are exchanged among contracting parties. The communication of such documents is not merely the passing of information, but reflects, indeed enacts , the formation and discharge of commitments. Such communications are called performative (versus informative) in that the act of communicating itself is a social action that alters the (contractual, legal, ownership) relationship among the parties. This paper proposes four tasks for supporting performative aspects of electronic commerce. The first is that performative documents be communicated using cryptographic protocols (including digital signatures) and the involvement of trusted third parties. A special problem is negotiable documents, which may involve the use of chip cards, specialized registries, or both. The second task is the definition of a common, publicly available language for the specification of documentary procedures, which is formal, computable and executable. We propose a formalism, called Documentary Petri Nets, for this purpose. The third task is the definition of standard business scenarios using this representation. This definition might be done on a proprietary basis, or perhaps by industry-wide user groups and/or international bodies such as the ISO (International Standards Organization) and the ICC (International Chamber of Commerce). A CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) tool presented in this paper, InterProcs, is designed to support undertaking this latter task by providing both a modeling platform and a testing environment for proposed documentary procedures. The fourth task is development of an architecture and a protocol for sharing these procedures among contracting parties. Three modes are suggested: globally standardized procedures; proprietary procedures; and multi-lateral coordination.

Standard (that is, long-standing and currently much in use) EDI protocols (including the X12 and EDIFACT series) have repeatedly been criticized for poor design, confusing or absent semantics, and much else. Most of these criticisms are indeed on the mark. The main conclusions that the critics have drawn are also correct: business-to-business e-commerce is expensive and difficult to set up and maintain, because of shortcomings in the design concepts underlying standard EDI. Something must be done, but what? Central to the problem is the fundamental question of semantic transparency: When A sends B a message, how does B’s machine know what the message is about, what it means? Given proper standards, message meanings are determined and computers can be programmed to act appropriately to the intended message meanings. The complaint against EDI has been that proper standards cannot be made because of the misguided way in which the EDI standards are designed. Proponents of XML have been touting XML’s strengths and claiming that they overcome, or can overcome, the semantic transparency problem in e-commerce. In support of this claim, proponents point to the DTDs (or similar devices) that any XML/EDI solution would use. The claim is that semantic transparency is/can be achieved through the DTDs. In this paper I argue that indeed the DTD mechanism offers a kind of progress on the semantic transparency problem, but that it cannot provide anything approaching a complete solution. While XML+DTDs is indeed a very promising vehicle for structuring and transporting messages for business-to-business commerce, it is not itself a semantic theory of what those messages say. We need the semantic theory. Once we have that, XML can be used to embody it for applications. Drawing on previous work, I will present the elements of my formal semantic theory for business messaging (the “lean events theory”). With examples from this theory before us, we can get a more proper view of the semantic transparency problem (aka: the spanning problem). This is not a problem that can be made to go away entirely, but we can live with it and do commerce.

Contracts and organizational controls to monitor contract compliance are important tools to enhance trust in a fair business transaction in network organisations and electronic commerce in general. In this chapter, we propose a design methodology for such contracts and supporting controls, utilizing inter-organisational value models. We argue that a framework for designing control mechanisms should include three steps: design of an inter-organizational value model, analysis of possible violations of contractual obligations underlying this value model, and design of control mechanisms to detect or prevent such violations. It is shown how the e^3-value methodology, which was developed to design business value models, can be extended to model obligations of parties. We use concepts and ideas from deontic logic (the logic of obligations and permissions) to develop an extension of e^3-value called e^3-value+. The e^3-value+ approach is a design tool for modelling violations of obligations, which can be used in contract drafting and contingency planning for inter-organisational collaboration in network organisations.

In the chapter we offer a verbal description of Sim-I-Space, an agentbased model that operationalises key features of a conceptual framework: the Information-Space (I-Space). The I-Space relates the speed and extent of information flows between agents to how far their messages have been structured through acts of codification and abstraction. The more structured a message, the faster and more extensively it diffuses to other agents—intentionally or not. Following a brief introduction, the paper divides into two sections. Section 2 describes the models architecture, the agents, the nature of the knowledge assets that they create, articulate, and trade in, and the types of the interactions—trading, licensing, joint-venturing, merging and acquiring—that agents can engage in. Section 3 presents the main components of Sim-I-Space, namely, agent characteristics, agent knowledge, and agent interaction. Two appendices—A and B—describe the model variables and provide a more detailed model specification.