Facilitating Dynamic Collaborations with eContract Services

Electronic Contract (eContract) has been recognized as a good combination of technical specification and legal documentation for establishing and regulating virtual organizations built for dynamic collaborations. This paper presents a design and implementation of an eContract service with an aim of providing a trusted collaboration platform for collaborators. The implemented service uses Web services technologies to facilitate its collaborators not only to contribute resources in an eContract, but also to negotiate and instantiate them through eContract. This paper describes the interface and protocols for the eContract service. The architecture, interface and protocols designed for the service are demonstrated using an example of providing universal connectivity service for a telepresence application in the context of eResearch domain.