Extraction of Business Contracts and Temporal Constraints in Business Events

Abstract
The key to successful contract management is the presence of competent people on both the mine owner's and the contractor's teams. When competent people are present on a project, problems will nearly always be resolved; the work will be well planned by the mine owner and well executed by the contractor Projects may survive inadequacies on the mine owner's side but no1: in the contractor's team.A competent contractor can often compensate for deficiencies on the other side. Unfortunately, disaster will often strike if the contractor's team does not know what its doing. The first casualty when competence is lacking is trust and cooperation between the parties. This is because each party will be blaming the other for all the problems that will inevitably be starting to trouble the project. Contracts are legally binding descriptions of business service engagements. In particular, we consider business events as elements of a service engagement. Business events such as purchase, delivery, bill payment, bank interest accrual not only correspond to essential processes but are also inherently temporally constrained. Identifying and understanding the events and their temporal relationships can help a business partner determine what to deliver and what to expect from others as it participates in the service engagement specified by a contract.
Keywords:Cloud Computing, Service engagements, Contract mining, Business events.
INTRODUCTION
Modern business service engagements are becoming Increasingly more numerous and more complex. To consider service engagements in the broad sense. Thus to include not just traditional examples of service engagements, such as customer relationship management or business process outsourcing, but also other business interactions, such as manufacturing and software licensing. Because service engagements are specified via business contracts, the expansion of the importance of service engagements in modern business is seen in the increasing number of contracts. For example, InfoSys reports1 that 60% to 80% of business transactions are governed by contracts and that an average Fortune 2000 company manages 20,000 to 40,000 active contracts at any given time. The above business trend exposes some new broad challenges in service computing. The first challenge is how, during enactment, a contractual party can understand a contract so as to determine its actions (and design its IT systems) to support its participation in the service engagement. Specifically, would it be able to guide the development of its business processes and monitor its interactions? That is, would the party be able to deliver its part of a service engagement and determine what to expect from its partners in that service engagement? The second challenge is how, during negotiating a service engagement, a party can examine and draft contracts in a manner that incorporates the general practices of the relevant domain. The problem of specifying, adopting, and enacting a service engagement is exacerbated by the fact that contracts are expressed in natural language. Further, often the people who negotiate and those who implement a contract have different skill sets. Accordingly, we are pursuing a research program that seeks to break the problem down into chunks that are amenable to computational analysis. In previous work [1], we tackled a part of the second of the above challenges by mining a repository of contracts to determine the possible business exceptions identified in different domains. To develop an approach that addresses both of the above challenges. This approach is based on the idea of business events—including business-related actions and activities such as purchase, delivery, bill payment, bank interest accrual, licensing, and dispute resolution. Business events indicate the essential processes involved in a service engagement as well as the risks and exceptions to consider. Moreover, the events are naturally temporally constrained, indicating the conditions on their occurrence. The violation of a temporal constraint is often an important factor in contractual breach and the resulting complications.