UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology Research Articles

Modeling e-government business processes: New approaches to transparent and efficient performance

Many governments worldwide are restructuring their business practices to improve their performances. To help describe and understand the process of restructuring, modeling techniques are used at different levels of modeling abstraction. This paper presents a new approach to the modeling of e-government business processes. It is based on two existing modeling techniques: Business Process Mapping (BPMapping) and UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology (UMM). The BPMapping technique provides an overall graphical representation of an organization depicting all different types of business processes, their inputs, outputs, and the environment in which the organization operates. The UMM methodology with its different business views gives details on collaborations and interactions of business processes. Combining BPMapping with UMM leads to a very expressive modeling approach which can provide artifact details at the higher levels of modeling abstraction and which also shows deployment strategies of the business processes. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, it is applied to the modeling of the Record Integrated Management business process at Quebec Government.

B2B Services: Worksheet-Driven Development of Modeling Artifacts and Code

In the development process of a B2B system, it is crucial that the business experts are able to express and evaluate agreements and commitments between the partners, and that the software engineers get all necessary information to bind the private process interfaces to the public ones. UN/CEFACT's modeling methodology (UMM) is a Unified Modeling Language (UML) profile for developing B2B processes. The formalisms introduced by UMM's stereotypes facilitate the communication with the software engineers. However, business experts—who usually have a very limited understanding of UML—prefer expressing their thoughts and evaluating the results by plain text descriptions. In this paper, we describe an approach that presents an equivalent of the UMM stereotypes and tagged values in text-based templates called worksheets. This strong alignment allows an integration into a UMM modeling tool and ensures consistency. We show how a specially designed XML-based worksheet definition language allows customization to special needs of certain business domains. Furthermore, we demonstrate how information kept in worksheets may be used for the semi-automatic generation of pattern-based UMM artifacts which are later transformed to web service definition language and business process execution language code.

Choreography of ebXML business collaborations

The ebXML framework consists of eight loosely coupled specifications for conducting e-Business. The choreography of ebXML business processes is defined by instances of the business process specification schema (BPSS). The BPSS is defined as an XML schema. It specifies elements describing the inter-organizational business processes, called business collaborations, but does not concentrate on intra-organizational business processes. Most of the underlying semantics were derived from the meta model of the UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology (UMM). In this paper we describe the characteristics of ebXML business collaborations. We demonstrate how these concepts are captured by UMM and BPSS. These concepts must be supported by any proposed alternative business process interchange format in order to bridge between ebXML and other approaches, or even to replace BPSS.

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