Searching Corporate Contracts

"From a Nextance/Oraclce press release (April 5, 2005): 'Nextance Support of Oracle XML Database Gives Visibility into Key Unstructured and Structured Data Found Only in Contractual Agreements. Nextance Inc... today announced working with Oracle to accelerate the industry's adoption of XML databases as the only technology standard capable of managing the intrinsically complex mix of both structured and unstructured data within contractual agreements -- the cornerstone of all business relationships. The advantages that XML delivers are most pronounced in Enterprise Contract Management solutions, with contracts containing a significant and untapped reservoir of unstructured language -- such as revenue sharing models, exclusivity rights, intellectual property ownership, fees and penalties -- which are essential in properly measuring the risk and reward potential of customer, supplier and partner relationships. "There is a tremendous wealth of business-critical information hidden in contractual agreements, but it is complex, highly variable from business unit to business unit and will change over time," explained Donald Feinberg, vice president and distinguished analyst of Gartner's data management and integration group. "Therefore, to conduct business with both eyes open, you need an architecture that can capture and harvest this complex data more effectively than the traditional relational databases in production today.'

PS: Nextance and Oracle say this service provides "open access" to corporate data, but it's not clear what they mean by the term. The service will certainly provide more intelligent searching of contract terms, but it probably won't be free of charge. In any case, think of how useful it would be to search across journal copyright transfer agreements looking for journal policies on self-archiving, author re-use, and rights retained by authors."

Source: Peter Suber. Searching corporate contracts. OA News (18 April 2005) [FullText]