FRONTIERS OF E-BUSINESS RESEARCH 2003 TOWARD A SEMANTICALLY RICH BUSINESS MODELLING LANGUAGE FOR THE AUTOMATIC COMPOSITION OF WEB SERVICES Abstract

As part of the construction of a Europe-wide Digital Business Ecosystem, in this paper we begin to ask several questions about how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), their business processes, and the services they rely upon can be modelled. For the purposes of this paper we focus more on the subset of SMEs that can be loosely described as software producers. The Digital Business Ecosystem (DBE) is a concept for an open-source distributed environment that can support the spontaneous evolution and composition of software services, components, and applications. Our purpose is to develop a Business Modelling Language (BML) that can be compiled into service specifications that include behaviours, functional interfaces and semantics. In the construction of language, the DBE research follows a topdown approach that privileges business interactions in a digital ecosystem and servic