Title: Legal Compliance in Commercial Service Provisioning Across Administrative Domains
Author: Martin Waldburger
e-mail: waldburger@ifi.uzh.ch
Partner: UniZH
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Burkhard Stiller
Committee: Prof. Dr. Burkhard Stiller, NN
Year of start: 2004
Year of end: 2008
Funding institution: University of Zurich, Department of Informatics (IFI)

The scope of this doctoral thesis is the conceptual development and prototypical implementation of an automated contract formation architecture for value-added services in the Internet. Commercial offerings of value-added services in the Internet base on contractual agreements. Applicable contractual terms are expressed in Service Level Agreements (SLA) and technically refined by individual metrics (Service Level Objectives, SLO), whereas a Service Level Specification (SLS) is perceived as a technically interpreted SLA with its SLOs for a given contract. Accordingly, this thesis addresses two problems as follows:

• For given parties (in terms of legal entities) and a given electronic service to be provided, a decision has to be taken, if at all and under which governing law a contract can be concluded.
• Once a contract was agreed upon, the service provision itself needs to be legally compliant with the governing law in question.

Legal compliance in relation to the first problem refers to commerce law requirements on concluding contracts and in particular to private international law (conflicts of laws). Legal compliance in relation to the second problem refers to compliance with negotiated contractual terms as characterized by SLS conditions. In order to conduct automated compliance checks on both problems two distinct prerequisites are identified:

• A mapping mechanism from a given ES (End System) or IS (Intermediate System) within an AS (Autonomous System) to a legal domain (typically a territory or a state) is needed.
• Guaranteed associations between contractual partners need to be taken.

1. Martin Waldburger, Burkhard Stiller: Legal Compliance in Commercial Service Provisioning Across Administrative Domains. 13th EUNICE Open European Summer School and IFIP TC6.6 Workshop on Dependable and Adaptable Networks and Services (EUNICE 2007), pages 1-8, Enschede, The Netherlands, July 2007.