Re: eBTWG BPSS Project Proposal

[Maarten Steen <maarten.steen@telin.nl>]

Bob, Dave and others,

Perhaps this type of discussion should take place within the newly formed
Business Collaborations and Monitored Commitments project team. My apologies for
starting it. May I suggest we move this thread to the ebtwg-bcp list using a
more appropriate subject? Or has the project not yet officially started and
should we wait for the kick-off meeting in October?

Maarten Steen


bhaugen wrote:

> From: Maarten Steen
> > I still don't understand though why transactions are not good enough to
> communicate business commitment. For me a transaction is an atomic
> interaction between two parties that results in a common understanding of
> the state in the shared business process. Transactions can therefore be used
> to
> > communicate commitments, like "by placing this order I promiss to pay X
> amount, and you promiss to deliver Y goods within Z days." If you don't want
> to rely on documents or messages being exchanged in transactions, then how
> else do you communicate commitment?
>
> Maarten,
>
> I know Dave is swamped with work right now, so please forgive me
> if I jump in and try to respond.  We think alike on this, although
> Dave sometimes explains better.
>
> Transactions *are* good enough to communicate business commitment.
> We're talking about managing the relationships between the transaction
> that forms a commitment, and the subsequent transactions that
> fulfill the commitment.
>
> Our premise is that:
>
> 1. Monitoring the fulfillment of commitments is a major task
> in the ongoing maintenance of B2B ecommerce operations,
> as Dave can attest.  He now keeps several people busy
> doing this.  Most of it could be automated if the ebXML
> runtime software understood what to monitor.
>
> 2. The workflow style of choreographing business collaborations,
> which all of the current crop of approaches seem to favor,
> including BPSS, BPML, WSFL, XLang, whatever, is akin to
> procedural programming.  Users will need to get into transitions,
> transitional expressions, forks, joins, etc. etc.  There will be
> bugs.
>
> We think that much of the choreography of collaborations
> can be made declarative by defining collaboration patterns
> that already have the choreography built in.  Commitment
> and fulfillment relationships will be the key building blocks
> of the most useful collaboration patterns.  (Or so we think.)
>
> Does that clarify?
>
> -Bob Haugen

--
Dr. ir. Maarten W.A. Steen - Scientific Researcher
Telematica Instituut, Postbus 589, 7500 AN  Enschede, The Netherlands
http://www.telin.nl/
phone: +31(0)53 4850 321
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