RE: Collaboration Services (was: Business Service Interface)

[Bob Haugen <linkage@interaccess.com>]

Stefano,

Thank you for your extremely clear summary of the thread so far.
I agree with almost everything you wrote.  Actually, I agree with
everything you wrote but would add a couple of things:

>This said, when I read through the "Collaboration Modelling Metamodel" 
>document I found myself a little bit lost. 

The online example might help (watch for word wrap):
http://www.ebxml.org/project_teams/business_process/wip/ccbp-analysis/mmx/index.html 
(Although it really doesn't get down the level you are looking for...)

>Actually, with the BusinessServiceInterface paper I am looking for "reconciling" 
>the Conceptual view presented by that (and other) document(s) with an 
>"execution oriented" view, which is the one which will finally exercise (at runtime) 
>all the other concepts

I agree that this is necessary.  The BP group is working on an XML-ization
of the metamodel.  Jean-Jacques, a participant in this thread, is one of
the main participants in that effort.

Figures 12 & 13 in the metamodel document are Jim Clark's
attempt to specify the runtime software for managing the 
commercial transaction patterns (but not the longer
collaborations).  So far, there is no similar spec for the
runtime software for longer collaborations.  Thus I suggested
that the two levels might reasonably be separated into
two different service levels:  the commercial transaction level,
which has been specified and is in fact pretty much implemented
by some of the RosettaNet vendors, and the collaboration level,
which I suspect is not.

>Now, the same consideration applies to the management of state. 
[...]
>Of course the message from Party_A changes the state of Party_B; but it also 
>changes the state of the global system (the global Business Process). I am not 
>interested in "managing" the private state of each party [...] but I am interested 
>in managing the global state (the state of the Business Process) as it evolves 
>through the sequence of messages and activities. 

Exactly!  However, there are objects in the metamodel
(the Economic Elements, see especially Figure 7) that
represent the most common economic relationships
involved in business collaborations.  For example,
negotiations often involve making reciprocal commitments,
and the state of the negotiation is actually represented
by the states of those commitments:  e.g. Proposed,
Countered, Accepted, Rejected, etc.
Likewise the Economic Elements explicitly model
order-fulfillment-payment collaborations.
Those are some of the hooks I was talking about.
They need some refinement, which was put on hold
to give the requirements for the Tokyo POC highest
priority.

Thanks again,
Bob Haugen