Institutional services for dynamic virtual organizations

Electronic Institutions are comprehensive frameworks that may effectively help in the collaborative work of virtual organization activities. This paper focuses on an effort to create e-contracting and ontology-based services in the context of Electronic Institutions. The e-contracting services provide automatic specification of business agreements by formalizing them through e-contracts, plus the procedures for enforcing them. Moreover. ontology-based services enable the interoperability between agents representing organizations using different ontologies. Ontology services provide useful advices on how to negotiate specific items, leading to appropriate conversations and making agreements possible. We believe that the rendering of these services will provide a level of trust and normative behavior allowing the creation, through electronic institutions, of dynamic virtual organizations and their operation.