Extending UMM with Speech Acts

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.