Business Processes and Context-Sensitive Business Documents

Exchanging business information by connecting computersystems of business partners is not particularly new, but seamlessintegration is still an open issue.The problem domain of seamlessinformation flows has two major dimensions. The first dimensiondeals with the format of the business data exchanged. The seconddimension, which represents the core of this book, focuses on thebusiness content of the information exchanged. In other words, thesemantics of the business information independent of therepresentation format. Only if business partners have a common viewon the business semantics their systems will be able tointeroperate. We propose to replace the document-centric approachby a business state-centric one. Business collaborations are aboutmanaging a shared view on business states. Aligning business statesbetween business partners requires the exchange of businessinformation. The business information is limited to the informationrequired to change the state of one or more business entitiesaffected by the exchange. We define a methodology based on businessstate management to unambiguously describe the business semanticsof a business collaboration.