18th December 2009, 10:46 am
The new VIENNA Add-In version 0.0.6 is available for download from the project website. The new release contains updated versions of the ABIE and BDT creation wizards. Furthermore, an automated importer for the Core Component Library CCL 09A and CCL 08B has been added. The importer allows for an automated import of the Core Component definitions as defined by the Core Component Library into Enterprise Architect.
4th December 2009, 12:56 pm
From 3rd – 4th December 2009 a successful workshop on the UN/CEFACT standard familiy was held at the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UN/ECE) in Geneva, Switzerland.
The topics covered by the workshop include: Core Components Technical Specification (CCTS), UML Profile for Core Components (UPCC), Core Component Library (CCL), Naming and Design Rules (NDR), UN/CEFACT’s Modeling Methodology (UMM), and the Buy-Ship-Pay Model.
All presentations are available in the presentation section.
28th October 2009, 06:25 pm
Upon various requests we have added a new presentation section to our website where you may find all UMM/UPCC related presentations. If you still miss a presentation or you want to add your own UMM/UPCC related presentation please drop us a line at liegl (at) big (dot) tuwien (dot) ac (dot) at
16th October 2009, 08:56 am
A new UMM 2.0 profile for Magic Draw has been added to the UMM Profile section.
The profile is available in two different versions:
Long version
This version uses the full names of the UMM 2.0 stereotypes
Short version
This version uses abbreviations for the UMM 2.0 stereotypes.
30th September 2009, 06:56 am
Birgit Hofreiter and Jan vom Brocke
On the Contribution of Reference Modeling to e-Business Standardization – How to Apply Design Techniques of Reference Modeling to UN/CEFACT’s Modeling Methodology
Abstract. Reference Modeling has evolved as a strong discipline especially driven by the German speaking community. Great achievements have been made in finding ways to leverage the potentials of reuse in business modeling. However, the perception of reference modeling as such is still limited to a rather small group of scholars. This is surprising as the phenomenon of “re-use” is very much in the center of various current topics in the international information systems and business process management discipline. In this paper, we set out exploring the contribution of findings in the field of reference modeling for business standardization. We show that in particular design techniques for reference modeling perfectly apply to solve conflicts of globalization and localization in business standards. As an example, we study the UMM as a specific standard developed within the United Nations CEFACT group.
16th July 2009, 11:14 am
A new version of the VIENNA Add-In has been released today and is ready for download.
Version 0.0.4 of the VIENNA Add-In now includes an initial UPCC package structure wizard and a tagged value synchronization. Tagged value synchronization automatically adds missing tagged values to UPCC artifacts in order to ensure model validity. Furthermore, the new release includes an ABIE creation wizard which allows to automatically derive business information entities together with business data types from core components and core data types, respectively. Finally, we have enhanced the XML generation feature. The VIENNA Add-In now allows the generation of NDR 3.0 compliant XML schema artifacts from core component models.
We encourage you to try out the new features and report any bugs using our issue tracker mechanism.
We have also added four videos, explaining the main functions of the new release.
24th June 2009, 04:23 pm
A new paper entitled “Using UN/CEFACT’s Modelling Methodology (UMM) in e-Health Projects” is available in the academic papers section.
16th June 2009, 08:18 am
A new case study presentation about Germany-Online Standardization (GOS) is available in the Case Study section.
GOS-Presentation
24th April 2009, 10:01 am
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.