Global electronic commerce through ebXML and service oriented architectures

Global electronic commerce has flourished following the commercialisation of the Internet. ebXML is a global business-to-business (B2B) electronic commerce standard which addresses not only the formats and vocabularies of electronic business documents exchanged between business partners, but also the choreography of business transactions during a collaborative process. On the other hand, the service-oriented architectures (SOA) together with web services promise a new era for B2B collaboration with dynamically created business partnerships transacting based on published choreographies, for which the ebXML BPSS (Business Process Specification Scheme) is a major specification language. This paper illustrates the approach with a contract negotiation process and identifies some implementation issues

A Hybrid Framework for Automated and Adaptive E-Business Platforms

The automation of business transactions between corporations has been dominated by proprietary and inflexible EDI solutions for a long time. During the last years, novel XML-based standards emerged which have a wider scope than EDI but strongly differ with regard to granularity and industry-focus. Due to the abundance of many complex standards with limited diffusion among users and industries, especially small-and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have not yet managed to automate the execution of business transactions and to seamlessly interconnect their respective IT applications. In this work, we propose a novel approach which builds on a composite of existing standards and combines them towards a hybrid architecture facilitating electronic business transactions. The Web Service stack represents the technical foundation of this approach, while parts of the ebXML standard are leveraged to ensure a common understanding of business information and processes between trading partners. A central server acts as repository of formal agreements, common data and process modeling artifacts and allows for intermittent connectivity of the users. Decentral adapter components enable connecting heterogeneous legacy applications of the users to the central server. The resulting approach can thus be considered as hybrid regarding the degree of centralism involved and with respect to the combination of the Web services stack and the ebXML standard as an infrastructural foundation

QoS-Enabled B2B Integration

Business-To-Business Integration (B2Bi) is a key mechanism for enterprises to gain competitive advantage. However, developing B2Bi applications is far from trivial. Inter alia, agreement among integration partners about the business documents and the control flow of business document exchanges as well as applying suitable communication technologies for overcoming heterogeneous IT landscapes are major challenges. At the same time, choreography languages such as ebXML BPSS (ebBP), orchestration languages such as WS-BPEL and Web Services are promising to provide the foundations for seamless interactions among business partners. Automatically translating choreography agreements of integration partners into partner-specific orchestrations is an obvious idea for ensuring conformance of orchestration models to choreography models. Moreover, the application of such model-driven development methods facilitates productivity and cost-effectiveness whereas applying a service oriented architecture (SOA) based on WS-BPEL and Web Services leverages standardization and decoupling. By now, the realization of QoS attributes has not yet received the necessary attention that makes such approaches suitable for B2Bi. In this report, we describe a proof-of-concept implementation of the translation of ebBP choreographies into WS-BPEL orchestrations that respects B2Bi-relevant QoS attributes

A Comparison of Visual Modeling Notations for Web Services Choreography

The Web Services Choreography Description Language (WS-CDL) is an XML-based language for specifying business protocols for \emph{web services enabled} collaborative processes. The use of visual notations in modeling web services choreography has so far been done in an ad hoc fashion as seen in the literature. This paper presents a choreography example in four different visual modeling notations and compares them with regard to the semantics of WS-CDL. The results are useful for establishing a reliable visual approach to modeling web services choreography

Operations and Tool Support for Public View Transformations of Business Processes

This paper shows operations on models to derive Collaborative Business Processes models on a conceptual level that satisfy the requirements of information hiding and furthermore to use these reduced models for a configuration of executing information systems