The book covers the UN/CEFACT’s Modeling Methodology 1.0 and the UMM Add-In and provides an excellent 101 tutorial for new UMM users.

A whole chapter is dedicated to the UMM user guide which helps a novice user to create a valid UMM 1.0 model. Furthermore the different chapters include the Worksheet Editor and the UMM Validator being part of the UMM Add-In. The generation of process specifications from UMM models and the mapping of business information to document formats are also part of the book.

The abstract of the paper:

Inter-organizational systems have significantly been affected by Service-oriented Architectures (SOA) and Web Services – the state-of-the-art technology to implement SOA. SOA is said to enable quick and inexpensive changes of the IT in order to establish new business partnerships or to reflect changes in existing partnerships. However, current approaches to inter-organizational systems focus too much on existing Web Services standards and, thus, on the technology layer. In such an approach the technology drives the business. In this paper we analyze the shortcomings of this bottom-up approach. As an alternative we suggest a top-down methodology where the business requirements drive the technology. This methodology starts off with the business value perspective, leading to a business process perspective and resulting in an IT execution perspective. We do not invent any new approaches on each of these layers, rather we outline how existing approaches are used and combined into a business requirements driven approach to inter-organizational systems.

As part of the public lectures in electronic commerce Jaap Gordijn from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam presented the e3value methodology which has been developed by him. The e3value methodology helps the modeler to understand value flows between business partners. More information, academic work and tools around e3value can be found on the e3value website.

e3value will also be part of our upcoming project called BSopt (Business Semantics on top of Process Technology) starting 1st of March 2008. Stay tuned for more information!

The chapter will be named Service-oriented enterprise modeling and analysis.

Save your Christmas present for 2009 already now!

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 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.