The first section shall deliver an overall insight about this doctoral thesis. Section 1.1 gives a short introduction to the exchange of rights on goods or services within the scope of electronic commerce {short: e-commerce) and gives some examples of drawbacks that the current non-standardised e-commerce technology has. Section 1.2 then provides the theoretical background why standardised technology can improve and quicken e-commerce. In Section 1.3 the objectives of this doctoral thesis are defined. The subsequent section deals with the classification of this thesis into research theory (see Section 1.4) and introduce the research methods that have been applied. The first chapter closes with an overview of the overall structure of this thesis (see Section 1.5). integrate methods, tools, and applications, thus connecting human actors and machines more economically ... " similar approaches [DWW03, Ian02b], and the investigation of projects in which electronic contracts are used (e.g. the COLIS project 4).