RE: TPA and ebXML Header question

[Bob Haugen <linkage@interaccess.com>]

Forgive me for not trimming all the addressees; 
didn't know where to start.

Krishna Sankar wrote:
>	This thread is getting interesting.

Isn't it?

Dale Moberg wrote:
>Applications could handle session, if they were newly created to know about
>PIPs, choreographics, and the more elaborate forking and joining BPs
>that Krishna clearly describes. 

I am absolutely certain that new business applications will
emerge to handle complex collaborations between trading
partners.  In fact, this is happening already, and the EDOC
framework that several ebXML participants have been working
on is aimed at this position.  

The BP metamodel has very clear provisions for more complex
choreographics which it calls BusinessCollaborations.
One BusinessCollaboration can be composed of many
CommercialTransactions, and each CommercialTransaction
can be composed of more than one BusinessDocuments.

The Economic section of the BP metamodel contains
the elements that can relate different transactions.  For example,
Order-Fulfillment-Payment, or Contract Negotiations,
or Bidding, or even Negotiated Order Acceptance where 
the order may need to go back and forth with changes
before being accepted.  

The order acceptance that is being done now both in
ebXML POC and often in "real" e-commerce is a joke,
witness the companies in trouble for taking orders
they couldn't fill last Christmas.  We could at least
do an automated Available-To-Promise query
with a human-judgment alert on failure.  (Not
proposing to add this to the Tokyo POC, by
the way, but some vendors said they could do it.)

There is more to business collaboration than sending
one isolated document, and the usual internal business
application systems have no idea how to collaborate.
I'm not sure how far ebXML will go in this direction,
but the hooks exist in the metamodel.  I'd like to
see at least one multiple-transaction scenario happen
in Vancouver, and would be happy to help anybody
who wants to work on one.

Have fun,
Bob Haugen