UMM Development Site

A new paper entitled “Using UN/CEFACT’s Modelling Methodology (UMM) in e-Health Projects” is available in the academic papers section.

A new case study presentation about Germany-Online Standardization (GOS) is available in the Case Study section.

GOS-Presentation

VIENNA Add-In Presentation

We added three new papers to the academic papers section.

• 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.
• Conceptual Business Document Modeling using UN/CEFACT’s Core Components:
  Before two businesses can engage in a business-to-business process an agreement about the process execution order and the business documents exchanged in the collaborative process must be found. Although several initiatives from different industries have started standardization initiatives for business documents a set of shortcomings still remain. (1) The different standards do not have a common semantic basis causing inter-operability problems between them. (2) Furthermore, they try to include every possible element any industry might need into the business document standard. (3) Moreover, most of the standards are transfer syntax specific and do not provide a conceptual representation mechanism.
  In this article a new concept for the standardization of business documents called UN/CEFACT’s Core Components Technical Specification is presented which solves these shortcomings. Using Core Components the business document modeler can unambiguously define documents with a common semantic basis on a conceptual level. In order to allow for a better integration into UML modeling tools we introduce the UML Profile for Core Components. With the UML based core component model and an XML schema generator the modeler can derive XML schema artifacts from the conceptual model.
• Deriving Business Service Interfaces in Windows Workflow from UMM Transactions – long version:
  Modeling inter-organizational business processes identifies the services each business partner has to provide and to consume as well as the flow of interactions between them. A model-driven approach to inter-organizational business processes allows abstracting from the underlying IT platform and, thereby, guarantees to survive changes in technology. UN/CEFACT’s Modeling Methodology (UMM), which is defined as a UML profile, is currently one of the most promising approaches for modeling platform-independent business collaborations. However, well defined mappings to most of the current state-of-the-art candidate platforms are still missing. A candidate platform of growing interest is the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). In this paper, we outline a mapping from the basic UMM building blocks, i.e. business transactions, to business service interfaces (BSI) implemented in WF. Our approach shows that UMM business transaction models greatly abstract from the complexity of a BSI.

During the UN/CEFACT Forum in Rome we updated the UMM2 profile for Enterprise Architect. Amongst some bug fixes and clean-up tasks, the profile provides now an easy way to model the 6 UMM business transaction patterns. The patterns are located in the Business Transaction View Toolbox of the profile. After dragging a pattern onto the modeling canvas, the modeler only has to define the corresponding elements of the business transaction and the business transaction is drawn automatically.

Furthermore, the VIENNA Add-In has been updated to version 0.0.3. It provides some bug fixes mostly for the UPCC features. Please note that the current version of the VIENNA Add-In does not automatically install the UMM/UPCC profiles, but you have to install them manually as described on the corresponding pages (UMM / UPCC) .

Please report bugs and submit new feature requests using the issue page of the project on googlecode. Of course, interested users are encouraged to contribute to the development.

During the 14th UN/CEFACT Forum Meeting in Rome (April 20-24 2009) two workshops and hands-on-tutorials on UN/CEFACT’s Modeling Methodology and the UML Profile for Core Components (UPCC) will be held on Thursday, 23rd April 2009.

1st Workshop and Hands-on-Tutorial on UN/CEFACT’s Modeling Methodology 2.0 (UMM 2)
Thursday, 23rd April 2009, 09:00 – 12:00

1st Workshop and Hands-on-Tutorial on the UML Profile for Core Components 3.0 (UPCC 3)
Thursday, 23rd April 2009, 14:00 – 17:00

The new UMM 2.0 profile for Enterprise Architect is available. The updated profile information can now also be dynamically loaded. Thus it is guaranteed, that the UMM business modeler always has the latest and most recent UMM 2.0 technology at hand.

The first beta version of the VIENNA-AddIn has been released today. Please download and install it and check out the new features provided by the AddIn.

Any errors found should be reported using the issue tracker of the project’s website.

The UMM development team wishes all UMM users Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! We are looking forward for a continuing fruitful cooperation in 2009!