RE: Collaboration Services (was: Business Service Interface)

[Bob Haugen <linkage@interaccess.com>]

<Jean-Jacques Dubray>
 If you feel pre/post conditions are more convenient I can live with it, 
please do not say they are better or different in the context of "sequences". 
</Jean-Jacques Dubray>

I am happy to let both approaches co-exist, and we can see if we
have a more important disagreement (or maybe not).

I suspect we are probably thinking of different use cases,
and if we make our perspectives clear, some of the other
disagreements may go away.

1. I am thinking of business collaborations where it is not possible 
to say beforehand what step comes next, because it depends on 
the state established by the combination of previous steps and 
the state of some other business condition, e.g. inventory or 
process capacity. Thus the need for specialized business collaboration 
software that can communicate with trading partners on one hand 
and the internal business systems on the other, in order to
decide what comes next.

2. I am also thinking of the work of the Core Process group,
where process components are being defined.  There too
it is impossible to say what step comes next, because
the process components may be composed in many
different ways.

As to scope, the core processes are already being defined 
in ebXML. The specialized business collaborations will be 
developed outside ebXML, but the hooks exist in the metamodel,
which I find useful as I try to design some longer collaborations.

What use cases are on your mind?  

Regards,
Bob Haugen