RE: ebXML Entity Classes - Resend

[Karsten Riemer - Sun IR Development <Karsten.Riemer@east.sun.com>]

Bob,
I believe REA will provide a perfect framework for this linkage between business process
and information model.
In fact, I believe that it is the Business Model (expressed in REA or some extension
thereof) that drives both the Process model choreography and the Information model.
 
I will be going to the Washington D.C. X12/EWG meeting to try to get buy-in to this 
notion.

I would like to start a discussion ahead of that meeting with anyone else who has similar
beliefs.

-karsten



>
>>> A deficiency of the diagram is that it is not preceeded by higher level
>>> class diagrams.
>
>>It is, but these are defined in the business process model
>
>I am involved in the BP work group, working on business collaboration
>patterns.  By that I mean, larger and longer business conversations
>composed of many documents and transactions with relationships
>between them.  In this message I will use the pattern of supply
>chain materials management, typically composed of:
>Stage 1. set up - exchanging type or master information
>              e.g. parties, products, locations
>Stage 2. long term, usually yearly, contracts
>Stage 3. short-term, often weekly, releases against the contracts
>Stage 4. shipments which fulfill the release commitments
>Stage 5. payments for the shipments
>
>In Vancouver, I had a number of discussions with core components 
>people including Lisa Shreve and Martin Bryan about the relationships 
>of business process models to information models.  I then took those 
>conversations back into BP discussions.
>
>Here are some of my findings:
>
>A. In business collaborations such as the one outlined above,
>    there is a requirement for information consistency throughout
>    the whole collaboration and also from stage-to-stage.
>    The structure and representation must be the compatible,
>    and also some of the values.
>    For example, the products to be released in stage 3 must
>    have been identified in stage 1 and contracted for in stage 2.
>B. At each stage, there is a small set of information elements
>    that are really necessary to do business, for example, at
>    the release stage: product, quantity, location, due date and time,
>    etc., where etc. is dependent on other aspects of context.
>    The necessary elements are somewhat different at each
>    stage, but must be consistent with the information at
>    other stages.
>C. There are relationships among the documents at each
>     stage:  for example, releases are constrained by the
>     yearly contract; shipments must fulfill release commitments;
>     payments must compensate for shipments.
>     If these relationships do not hold (e.g. the payment
>     does not cover the price of the shipment), there is
>     a problem in the collaboration for which a remedy
>     will be sought.
>     The small set of information referred to in #B is
>     what is needed to express the relationships among
>     documents in different stages.
>     In general, the relationships among documents
>     and stages is given in Bill McCarthy's REA model,
>     which is now embedded in the UN/CEFACT TMWG
>     UMM (N090) metamodel, which is also the ebXML
>     BP metamodel.
>
>We'll be fleshing this set of ideas out in some organizational
>form after ebXML - don't know where yet for sure.  If interested,
>let me know.  (Won't make the deadlines for ebXML.)
>
>Regards,
>Bob Haugen
>
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