A Review and comparison of service E-Contract Architecture Metamodels

Abstract

An adaptive service e-contract is an electronic agreement which is required to enable adaptive or agile service sourcing and pro- visioning. There are a number of e-contract metamodels that can be used to create a context specific adaptive service e-contract. The chal- lenge is which one to choose and adopt for adaptive services. This paper presents a review and comparison of well-known e-contract metamod- els using the architecture theory. The architecture theory allows the analysis of the e-contract metamodels using a three-dimension analyt- ical lens: structure, behavior and technology. The results of this paper highlight the metamodels structural, behavioral and technological differ- ences and similarities. This paper will help researchers and practitioners to observe the existing e-contract metamodels are appropriate to the adaptive services or if thwhetherere is a need to merge and integrate the concepts of these metamodels to propose a new unifying adaptive service e-contract metamodel. This paper is limited to the number of compared metamodels.