In this article, we propose to adopt the SCIFF language to specify
business contracts and show how its proof procedure is useful to
verify contract execution and fulfilment. SCIFF is a declarative
language based on abductive logic programming, which accommodates
forward rules, predicate definitions, and constraints over finite
domain variables. Its declarative semantics is abductive, and can be
related to that of deontic operators; its operational specification is
a sound and complete proof procedure, defined as a set of transition
rules, which has been implemented and integrated into a reasoning and
verification tool. A variation of the SCIFF proof-procedure (g-SCIFF)
can be used for static verification of contract properties.
We demonstrate the use of the SCIFF language for business contract
specification and verification, in a concrete scenario. In order to
accommodate integration of SCIFF with architectures for business
contract, we also show the encoding of SCIFF contract rules in RuleML
