Downloadable Service Contracts for Disconnected Transactions

Client participation in all web-based services, e.g., shopping in online stores, creating service agreements as in buying a car insurance, currently demands browser based online operations with on-the-spot decision making. In contrast, organizational (business-to-business) procurement relies on complex decision making software at each end for comparison shopping and/or satisfying various organization specific goals. Supporting disconnected operations for business-to-consumer scenario can introduce some of the same benefits at the individual consumer level. In this paper, we propose the concept of a downloadable service contract, that specifies unambiguous rules of interaction between an end client and a service provider. The client initially negotiates with the service provider a contract, which is subsequently used not only to guide off-line client operations, but also for validating at the service provider the log of actions, i.e., a purchase order, submitted by the client. A generic application program for browsing a downloaded contract and creating an order, may be made available by the service providers. However, a client may have its own software with many value-added services such as comparison shopping across multiple contracts, matching complex user specific goals and maintenance of interaction histories. We describe a prototype system that extends the current Ariba cXML protocol for MRO procurement.