UN/CEFACT’s Business Collaboration Framework - Motivation and Basic Concepts

Although standards for B2B e-Commerce exist, business partners still need additional bilateral agreements and coding partner-specific adaptations of their applications. Most research is conducted in the area of IT-solutions to interconnect the systems. Less activities are directed towards a shared business logic that allows business servers to collaborate. UN/CEFACT’s business collaboration framework (BCF), which is presented in this paper, addresses this point. Instead of connecting two independent systems, it considers a B2B relationship to be a single system with interface on each partner’s end. The goal of this paper is to motivate the need for the BCF and to give a basic introduction into the methodology used in BCF.