Contracting in the days of eBusiness

Putting electronic business on a sound foundation --- model theoretically as well as technologically --- has to be seen as a central challenge for research as well as for commercial development. This paper concentrates on the discovery and the negotiation phase of concluding an agreement based on a contract. We present a methodology how to come seamlessly from a many-to-many relationship in the discovery phase to a one-to-one relationship in the contract negotiation phase. Making the content of the contracts persistent is achieved by reconstructing contract templates by means of mereologic (logic of the whole-part relation). Possibly nested sub-structures of the contract template are taken as a basis for negotiation in a dialogical way. For the negotiation itself the contract templates are extended by implications (logical) and sequences (topical)