New generations of electronic business technologies promise radical advances in ICT support for European Business. Technologies such as ebXML and Web Services as well as the frameworks under development in flagship European IST projects such as ATHENA and DBE promise significant increases in possible automation, interoperation and flexibility of business systems.  

Despite technical advances however, design, development and management of such systems still presents huge challenges. As the scale of new business ecosystems and individual business applications grows, it is becoming increasingly difficult to predict likely behaviour, both in terms of software correctness (determining whether indeed a collection of services deployed by many organisations behaves coherently) and in terms of meeting business needs (providing guarantees to individual participating companies that their objectives will be met). More specifically, increases in automation and flexibility must be weighed against the need for rigorous analysis of possible execution behaviour and the need for transactions to be underpinned by binding legal agreements. Unfortunately such guarantees are inherently difficult to provide, leading to recognition that there is a widening gap between the type of systems which may be engineered using new technologies and what could be safely deployed in a operational business context.

Within this context, the aim of the CONTRACT project is to provide new innovative solutions which specifically help to bridge the gap between the new large-scale applications in Digital Business Environments and the need for sound software and business guarantees for such systems.

To achieve this goal, the project built on and developed one of the most promising emerging paradigms for this purpose, that is, the use of dynamic contractual agreements as a leading metaphor for business system specification, design and management.

In particular, the CONTRACT project aimed to provide:

• A novel sound theoretical framework for contracting in Digital Business Ecosystems
• A set of novel Languages for expressing and exchanging contracts in Digital Business Ecosystems
• A set of software components and tools which embody the theoretical frameworks and languages in order that they may be used in experimental or real Digital Business Ecosystems.
• A set of use scenarios demonstrating how contracting can be applied in a variety of eBusiness scenarios within Digital Business Ecosystems.