Semantically Enriched Obligation Management - An Approach for Improving the Handling of Obligations Represented in Contracts

Barbara Thönssen, Jonas Lutz

2012

Abstract

Contract Management becomes increasingly important for companies and public administrations alike. Obligations and liabilities are described in contract clauses that are often buried in documents of a hundred pages and more. Although commercial Contract Management Systems (CMS) are available, with a few exceptions relevant information has to be extracted manually which is time consuming and error prone. But even if information extraction is automated and contracts are managed using a CMS, dealing with obligations is still a challenge. Whereas the CMSs deal well with time triggered obligations like periodical payments by setting up corresponding workflows, they fail to trigger obligations based on events, as this knowledge is out of the systems’ scope. We introduce an approach to fill the gap as we relate information about the obligations managed in a CMS with background knowledge modelled in an ontology. The ontology is a formal representation of an enterprise architecture extended by top-level concepts. Motivating scenario for the approach is the contract management of a large company. For proof of concept a prototype has been developed.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Thönssen B. and Lutz J. (2012). Semantically Enriched Obligation Management - An Approach for Improving the Handling of Obligations Represented in Contracts . In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing - Volume 1: KMIS, (IC3K 2012) ISBN 978-989-8565-31-0, pages 40-48. DOI: 10.5220/0004134700400048

in Bibtex Style

@conference{kmis12,
author={Barbara Thönssen and Jonas Lutz},
title={Semantically Enriched Obligation Management - An Approach for Improving the Handling of Obligations Represented in Contracts},
booktitle={Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing - Volume 1: KMIS, (IC3K 2012)},
year={2012},
pages={40-48},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0004134700400048},
isbn={978-989-8565-31-0},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing - Volume 1: KMIS, (IC3K 2012)
TI - Semantically Enriched Obligation Management - An Approach for Improving the Handling of Obligations Represented in Contracts
SN - 978-989-8565-31-0
AU - Thönssen B.
AU - Lutz J.
PY - 2012
SP - 40
EP - 48
DO - 10.5220/0004134700400048