Birgit Hofreiter

Transforming UMM Business Collaboration Models to BPEL

UN/CEFACT’s Modeling Methodology (UMM) has been developed to analyze and design B2B business processes independent of the underlying exchange technology. It became the methodology of choice for developing ebXML business processes. Another technology for realizing B2B partnerships is Web Services. Currently, the business process execution languages (BPEL) seems to be the winner amongst the Web Services languages for orchestration and choreography. If Web Services is used as underlying exchange technology for B2B, the semantics of UMM business processes must be represented in BPEL. The goal of this paper is to verify whether BPEL is appropriate to capture UMM business collaborations or not. For this purpose we describe a transformation from UMM to BPEL.

ebXML: status, research issues, and obstacles

Technologies and approaches in the field of electronic commerce are not mature enough in order to allow for their broad successful commercial application. Neither existing, successful approaches that are very much restricted to large companies, specific branches, and business domains, nor approaches just merging new technologies like Internet, WWW, and XML allow for scaling up electronic commerce by means of arbitrarily high numbers of partners. All these approaches lack substantial reflection and integration of business semantics as the basis of any electronic commerce partnership. ebXML is a world-wide initiative that tries to address the drawbacks of existing standards and approaches and has the potential to successfully deliver solutions to these problems. We address the status of ebXML and identify open research issues to be solved in order to meet some of the obstacles on the way to a commercial application of ebXML.

Deriving executable BPEL from UMM Business Transactions

UN/CEFACTs modeling methodology (UMM) is a UML profile for modeling global B2B choreographies. The basic building blocks of UMM are business transactions, which describe the exchange of a business document and an optional response. In addition to these business document exchanges, UMM business transactions mandate business signals that acknowledge the correctness of business documents. It is expected that a business service interface (BSI) on each business partners side reacts on incoming messages and on messages expected but not received. However the internal orchestration of the BSI is open to interpretations. In this paper we demonstrate an unambiguous mapping from global choreographies described by UMM transactions to a BPEL-based orchestration of the business service interface. It becomes obvious that rather simple looking UMM transactions lead to a more complex message exchange mechanism when implemented on top of Web services.

A Model-Driven Top-Down Approach to Inter-organizational Systems: From Global Choreography Models to Executable BPEL

Today, most approaches for inter-organizational business processes start bottom-up from the interfaces and the workflows of each partner described on the IT layer. Alternatively, one may start from the commitments and agreements between business partners to reach their complementary business goals. The latter approach is target of the UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology (UMM), which models a global choreography. In a model driven approach the UMM artifacts must be further elaborated toward an IT solution for each participating business partner. For this purpose we have developed a UML profile to model a local choreography or an orchestration that respects the agreements made in the global choreography. In order to execute the local choreography / orchestration in the local IT, the processes must be machine-readable. For this purpose we demonstrate a transformation to the business process execution language (WS-BPEL).

UMM Add-In: A UML Extension for UN/CEFACT's Modeling Methodology

The tighter coupling of enterprises in regard to information system technology has also changed the way business processes are modeled. Modeling interorganizational business processes is necessary in order to gain a profound and unique representation of the processes involved. However this requires a new methodology especially designed for modeling inter-organizational business processes. The United Nations Center for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) took up the challenge and started to develop such a methodology. The research efforts became known as UN/CEFACTs modeling methodology (UMM) [1]. UMM enables the business modeler to capture the business knowledge independent of the underlying implementation technology such as ebXML or Web Services.

Business collaboration models and their Business Context‐dependent Web Choreography in BPSS

Prior to conducting business via the Web, business partners agree on the business processes they are able to support. In ebXML, the choreography of these business processes is described as an instance of the so‐called business process specification schema (BPSS). For execution purposes the BPSS must be defined in the exact business context of the partnership. Reference models for B2B processes developed by standard organizations usually span over multiple business contexts to avoid a multitude of similar processes. In this paper we present how business collaboration models following the UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology (UMM) are expressed in ebXML BPSS. To allow a mapping from multi‐context business collaboration models to a context‐specific choreography in ebXML BPSS we extend UMM to capture constraints for different business contexts

Modeling Business Collaborations in Context

Standard e-business document types are usually too ambiguous due to an overwhelming choice of data elements. Business partners must agree on a shared subset and adapt their application interfaces accordingly. Small and me- dium enterprises (SMEs) cannot perform this task. UN/CEFACTs Modeling Methodology (UMM) provides a methodology to define unambiguous business collaborations allowing software vendors to integrate corresponding APIs into their business software. Business collaborations depend on their business con- text, i.e. parameters describing the business environment. Instead of developing different models for each specific business environment, we need a single model for a specific business goal clearly specifying the context variations. In this paper we extend UMM to show how a generic business collaboration is adapted to different business contexts. This is demonstrated by a case study on ordering/selling books as well as tourism products.

Registering UMM Business Collaboration Models in an ebXML Registry

FACTs modeling methodology (UMM) is used to develop global choreographies of inter-organizational business processes. UMM models should be publically available in order to foster re-use and to reference them in trading partner agreements. In this paper we define a mapping of UMM models or parts thereof to the ebXML registry information model (RIM)

B2B Integration - Aligning ebXML and Ontology Approaches

In B2B e-commerce, XML provides means to exchange data between applications. It does not guarantee interoperability. On the syntactic level, this requires an agreement on an e-business vocabulary. Even more important, on the semantic level, business partners must share a common view unambiguously constraining the generic document types. In this paper, we present a framework that brings together work in the area of ontologies and work in the area of XML-based data interchange, namely ebXML. The framework uses an ontology based on ebXML corecomponents expressed in RDF to allow for bridging between different e-business vocabularies. Since a bridging mechanism is required, but not specified within ebXML, our approach complements ebXML. The integration of the ontology-based approach into ebXML is realized in four major steps. In this paper we exactly identify the requirements and the architecture of each step. This provides exact guidelines for future research towards implementing these steps.

OCL-Constraints for UMM Business Collaborations

Recently, a trend towards business processes in Business-to-Business e-Commerce (B2B) is apparent. One of the most promising approaches is UN/CEFACT’s modeling methodology (UMM) based on UML. However, developing a new UMM model for each small variation in a business process would lead in a multitude of “similar” business processes. Thus, a more generic UMM model together with well-defined constraints for different business environments is a better approach to ensure unambiguity. In this paper we develop templates for such constraints based on an extended version of OCL.