  Contracts are an essential and fundamental component of commerce and society,
serving to clarify agreement between multiple parties. While digital
technologies have helped to automate many activities associated with
contracting, the contracts themselves continue, in the main, to be in the form
of unstructured, natural-language text. This limits the scope for improvements
in productivity and automation, as well as the emergence of new business
models. To this end, this paper examines the concept of computable contracts as
objects that are understandable by both humans and computers, and goes on to
present a framework that unifies a range of technologies and approaches that
collectively will help to make computable contracting a reality.
