Conceptual Business Document Modeling using UN/CEFACT's Core Components

Before two businesses can engage in a business-tobusiness process an agreement about the process execution order and the business documents exchanged in the collaborative process must be found. Although several initiatives from different industries have started standardization initiatives for business documents a set of shortcomings still remain: (1) the different standards do not have a common semantic basis causing inter-operability problems between them and they (2) try to include every possible element any industry might need into the business document standard. (3) Moreover, most of the standards are transfer specific and (4) do not provide a conceptual representation mechanism. In this article a new concept for the standardization of business documents called UN/CEFACT’s Core Components Technical Specification is presented which solves these shortcomings. Using Core Components the business document modeler can unambiguously define documents with a common semantic basis on a conceptual level. In order to allow for a better integration into UML modeling tools we introduce the UML Profile for Core Components. With the UML based core components model and an XML schema generator the modeler can derive XML schema artifacts from the conceptual model.