Modeling Business Collaborations in Context

Standard e-business document types are usually too ambiguous due to an overwhelming choice of data elements. Business partners must agree on a shared subset and adapt their application interfaces accordingly. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) cannot perform this task. UN/CEFACT’s Modeling Methodology (UMM) provides a methodology to define unambiguous business collaborations allowing software vendors to integrate corresponding APIs into their business software. Business collaborations depend on their business context, i.e. parameters describing the business environment. Instead of developing different models for each specific business environment, we need a single model for a specific business goal clearly specifying the context variations. In this paper we extend UMM to show how a generic business collaboration is adapted to different business contexts. This is demonstrated by a case study on ordering/selling books as well as tourism products.