Legal procedures as formal conversations: contracting on a performative network

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is a telecommunications system that many view as the next major productivity gain made possible by information technology. This paper discusses how our semantic, procedure-oriented view of business transactions leads to a different kind of telecommunications system -- a performative network. Viewing procedures as formal conversations, we present a representation schema and grammar to model these conversations and initiate the development of a formal language by which users can cooperate, negotiate, and make commitments over a performative network. Our approach complements and extends EDI's syntactic, record-format orientation, seeking to express not only the data transmitted through these transactions but also the semantics of the procedures themselves.