Business Process Editor reuse issue

[Bob Haugen <linkage@interaccess.com>]

Karsten Riemer brought up an issue about whether the BPE
should be editing Commercial Transactions or 
CommercialTransactionActivities.  I talked to him more
this morning and think there is a general issue behind
his question, which is about reuse of CommercialTransactions
and BusinessCollaborations in different contexts:
that is, reusing a CommercialTransaction in different
BusinessCollaborations, and reusing BusinessCollaborations
in different BusinessProcesses, etc.

(Note:  I'm not sure the CT vs CTA issue is the crux
of the matter, or even relevant - it was just the initial
hook for the problem.)

I think the issue is whether reusing these artifacts obeys 
(a) copy semantics (e.g. cut-and-paste or save-as), 
     where the copy has no further relationship to its
     source, and changes to the source do not affect
     the copy; 
or
(b) reference semantics, where the reuse context 
     just has a reference to the source, and changes 
     to the source do affect the reused artifact.

The problem is that the reuse context will most
likely want to change some of the properties of
the source artifact, in particular, precondition
and postcondition expressions, or in the case
of CommercialTransactions, timing parameters.

This issue came up in the F2F meeting in Santa Clara,
and I gave my opinion that CommercialTransactions
could use copy (save-as) semantics, and also that reuse was
not so important at that level because the transactions
would all be derived from patterns anyway so there
was not so much payback for reuse of the same
artifact.

However, there would be payback for reuse of
BusinessCollaborations, and so we needed to
figure out how to do it (not necessary for 
Vancouver).

However, Karsten raised the issue of standard
predefined transactions in organizational forms
where the same literal transaction must be used
in many collaborations, and changes to the
standard transaction should affect all collaborations.

I'm just raising the issue at this point to see what
others think.  Is this something we need to worry
about?  How difficult will it be to handle?
Did I even pose the problem accurately? 

Thanks,
Bob Haugen