Specification of contractual obligations in formal business communication

摘要

Formal business communication is a process-oriented (vs. document-oriented) environment for digital interoorganizational business transactions. They improve efficiency and effectiveness of business communications and often provide strategic advantages. Thanks to the current advances in information and telecommunications technologies, the development of formal business communication systems plays one of the key roles in the establishment of digital commerce, or virtual organizational business transaction platform. This paper proposes a logic of relativized deontic modalities as a component of digital commerce systems. The logic of relativized deontic modalities provides syntactic and semantic treatment for such notions of duty in the context of formal business communications. Also addressed are the practical issue of conflicts of duties and their resolution based on defeasibility reasoning, and the dynamic aspect of contractual obligations including delegation of duties and assignment of rights. Finally, we suggest augmentation of the CASE/Open-EDI system with the proposed logic of contractual obligations.