Conceptual modeling and specification generation for B2B business processes based on ebXML

Abstract

In order to support dynamic setup of business processes among independent organizations, a formal standard schema for describing the business processes is basically required. The ebXML framework provides such a specification schema called BPSS (Business Process Specification Schema) which is available in two stand-alone representations: a UML version, and an XML version. The former, however, is not intended for the direct creation of business process specifications, but for defining specification elements and their relationships required for creating an ebXML-compliant business process specification. For this reason, it is very important to support conceptual modeling that is well organized and directly matched with major modeling concepts. This paper deals with how to represent and manage B2B business processes using UML-compliant diagrams. The major challenge is to organize UML diagrams in a natural way that is well suited with the business process meta-model and then to transform the diagrams into an XML version. This paper demonstrates the usefulness of conceptually modeling business processes by prototyping a business process editor tool called ebDesigner.