Bertrand Grégoire

Towards a reference ontology for business models

Ontologies are viewed as increasingly important tools for structuring domains of interests. In this paper we propose a reference ontology of business models using concepts from three established business model ontologies; the REA, BMO, and e3-value. The basic concepts in the reference ontology concern actors, resources, and the transfer of resources between actors. Most of the concepts in the reference ontology are taken from one of the original ontologies, but we have also introduced a number of additional concepts, primarily related to resource transfers between business actors. The purpose of the proposed ontology is to increase the understanding of the original ontologies as well as the relationships between them, and also to seek opportunities to complement and improve on them.

Business Service Network Design: From Business Model to an Integrated Multi-Partner Business Transaction.

This article presents a framework to design a business service network (BSN) in-line with a given business model. Particular emphasis is on the use of industry specific standards, existing business process components and best practices. Based on a sample business model for a brokerage service in the tourism sector, a multi-partner business transaction is designed. At each stage, the various factors that guide the decision-making are discussed

Animating ebXML Transactions with a Workflow Engine

ebXML is becoming the new international standard for the specification and deployment of complex B2B transactions over the internet. ebXML transactions are inherently distributed, involving many actors exchanging XML messages with each other according to complex flows and rules. This complexity hampers validation of the correctness of a modelled business transaction by business experts. To alleviate this problem, we have developed an animator to support the cooperative validation of ebXML transactions by business experts. The animator is internet-based, supporting distributed animation of an ebXML transaction. The animator automatically checks business rules on the messages exchanged during animation. Heart of the animator is a workflow engine that can read workflow descriptions in XPDL. In this paper, we show how the animator is automatically configured from the UML models describing the ebXML transaction. The main UML models used are class diagrams to model messages and an activity diagram to model the global flow of the messages that are exchanged by the actors. Class diagrams are annotated with business rules. The UML activity diagram maps into XPDL code for the workflow engine. The class diagrams map into XML Schemas that are used by the animator for receiving, checking and sending messages. The mapping algorithms have been implemented as plugins in a commercial UML-based CASE tool. Throughout the paper, we illustrate the whole approach on a real-life example.

If Business Models Could Speak! Efficient: a Framework for Appraisal, Design and Simulation of Electronic Business Transactions

In this paper we investigate the development of an appropriate business model associated with B2B transactions, designed according to the newly introduced ebXML standards. We explain the added value of such business model in complement to the more technical models defined by ebXML. In particular we explain the importance of achieving a better definition of the economic value associated with a B2B transaction. Together with the proposed business model ontology we also introduce a tool for supporting its management as well as a simulation tool for supporting decision making between different models.