Towards Integrating Collaborative Business Process Based on a Process Ontology and EbXML Collaboration Scenario

Abstract

Business-to-business e-commerce is emerging as trading parties are attempting to integrate their heterogeneous business processes and automate exchange of their services. To be able to collaborate, heterogeneity cross-organisational business processes needs adaptation of existing concepts for business process management. A shared ontology can encapsulate heterogeneity in business process model and offer common concepts to different partners. A problem is that, even agreeing on information to be exchanged, the partners usually expose different scenarios for collaboration. In this paper, we propose architecture for flexible modeling of company processes, to support a larger scale of B2B integration. The proposal is based on an extended ebXML scenario for companies to collaborate in a B2B context