An approach to implement contracts as trusted intermediaries

In a virtual enterprise context, business process interoperability and cooperative process enactment are important in order to achieve a common objective despite the distribution in space, time and organizations. A contract is a facility used to deploy cross-organizational processes, to monitor and to enforce the composition and the enactment of these processes both inside and outside the organization's boundaries. This paper presents a contract model for describing clauses that address business interactions, for deploying cross-organizational activities (called synchronization points) and for enforcing and controlling policies. The contract is an XML document used to describe how process Web services cooperates and how synchronization points enforce contract clauses.