Abstract:
The United Nations Center for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business
(UN/CEFACT) provides UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology (UMM) for
technology and protocol independent business process and business information
modeling for e-Commerce Systems development.
In e-Commerce, systems design is based on two fundamental types of models,
business models and process models. A business model is concerned with value
exchanges among business partners, while a process model focuses on operational and
procedural aspects of business communication. Thus, a business model defines the
what in an e-Commerce System, while a process model defines the how. This means
that the e-Commerce Systems development workflow consists of two main phases.
First, a business requirement capture phase focusing on value exchanges, and
secondly, a phase focused on operational and procedural realization of those
requirements. Among the meta-models defined in UMM, Business Requirements
Views (BRV) can be associated by designers for the business model development
while Business Transaction Views (BTV) and Business Service Views (BSV) can be
associated for business process models.
However it has been realized that still there is a gap between UMM's business
models and process models as much explanation cannot be found on how one can
move from coarse-grained views at initial phases to more fine-grained views at later
stages.
This work is addressed to bridge the gap between UMM's coarse-grained views at
initial phases and fine-grained views at later stages of e-Commerce Systems
development. For this purpose we are adopting well-established Speech Act theory for
modeling business communication and also we are proposing a unified framework
based on Speech Acts. This unified framework gives much clearer interpretations for
UMM's modeling concepts, facilitates business modeling and process modeling and
provides smoother integration between those models.
