The latest in e-contracts research: BCA collaborates with UKC
Speaker: James Cole, DSTC
When: 2003-06-04 10:00:00
Venue: 78-Level 7, DSTC Boardroom
Host: (seminar host unavailable)
Abstract:This talk will outline the outcomes of an e-contracts research
collaboration between the Elemental project at DSTC and researchers
at the University of Kent at Canterbury (UKC) in the UK, which has
involved two two-month visits between the teams.
Combining ideas from the research groups' previous work, the
collaboration developed an initial version of BCA (Business
Contracts Language), a language for expressing contract conditions
and other definitions used for contract automation.
A new element of BCA that was developed during the collaboration is
Time Windows, which allow the high-level specification of durations
of time which may be moved across a time-line and used to detect
certain types of occurrences or to provide query capabilities. Time
Windows are useful for implementing Quality of Service contracts.
Both groups have been developing systems that implement
contract-monitoring (checking that parties are not violating the
contract), and share a number of common goals and views of the
design of contracting systems. The researchers at DSTC are
developing the BCA (Business Contracts Architecture) contract
management system which implements a number of contract management
features; the researchers at UKC are developing the ECL (Enterprise
Contracts Language) system which is focusing on contract-monitoring,
and which uses the ODP (Open Distributed Processing) notion of a
community as an abstraction for specifying contracts.
This talk will discuss the outcomes of the collaboration, including
an overview of BCL focusing on the UKC group's Community Model and
time-windows, and will also give some introductory background on the
BCA system being developed by Elemental.
Biography:James Cole is a Research Scientist at the Research Centre for
Distributed Systems Technology (DSTC Pty Ltd), headquartered at the
University of Queensland, Australia. Within DSTC, he is a member of
the Elemental project which is focusing on electronic-contract
research and development. Prior to working at DSTC, James developed
a web-based course introducing Java to C programmers, for the
Faculty of Information Technology at the Queensland University of
Technology. He has also worked as tutor and presenter of computer
courses at TAFE (adult education) colleges. James holds an honours
degree in computer science from the Queensland University of
Technology. For his honours research he developed a parser
generator for the Multifaceted Grammars language formalism.
Type: DSTC seminar
Contact:(seminar host unavailable), seminar host (training@dstc.edu.au)
or Guido Governatori (ITEE seminar co-ordinator)
(guido@itee.uq.edu.au)