Open distributed systems are increasingly used to support business transactions within and across organisations. In order to achieve this goal, fundamental concepts of business practices should be incorporated into a supporting architecture. Support for business contracts can be regarded as an essential ingredient of such an architecture in terms of facilitating more efficient inter-organisational business interactions. This is augmented by the prevailing feeling in business today that global interdependencies are becoming more critical for gaining and maintaining the competitive edge. In this paper we make an initial attempt to identify important contract concepts from economic and legal standpoints and use them to derive a business contract framework. We further discuss how these concepts can be incorporated into an architecture for open distributed processing (ODP).
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