Representing Business Contracts in RuleML

This paper presents an approach for the specification and implementation of translating contracts from a human-oriented form into an executable representation for monitoring. This will be done in the setting of RuleML. The task of monitoring contract execution and performance requires a logical account of deontic and defeasible aspects of legal language; currently such aspects are not covered by RuleML; accordingly we show how to extend it to cover such notions. From its logical form, the contract will be thus transformed into a machine readable rule notation and eventually implemented as executable semantics via any mark-up languages depending on the client's preference, for contract monitoring purposes